The Least Of us

Rating: 10/10 (7 December 2009)

I'm glad that a number of reviewers have informed me that this highly unusual tale was a faithful adaption from the novel by Stephen King. I'm not much of a fiction reader so it is gratifying to hear that his vision got to the screen intact.
I would not have guessed this film would have come from a horror story writer. No monsters from the id or any place else are present in this story set in the American South of the Thirties. But demons do exist in The Green Mile and there is a man named John Coffey who takes them unto himself.
The Green Mile refers to the cell block housing the inmates scheduled for Death Row. In that cell block comes Michael Clarke Duncan who is close to seven feet tall and maybe weighing 400 pounds. He's also as docile as a baby lamb and whose only request is that they leave a night light burning because he gets a little afraid of a strange place in the dark.
Of course the guards who have the typical white Alabama attitudes of the day don't quite know what to make of them, but Tom Hanks who captains the cell block and most of the rest find out just how special he is. And Hanks cannot believe that someone like Duncan could possibly be guilty of a double rape/murder of a child.
This modern day parable of the Jesus story has King telling us that it is very possible that many of his kind have walked the earth with talents for healing. One of them got a religion worked around him, but they can come in all walks of life and certainly no one would expect one to come in the guise of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. But one of my favorite Bible verses has Jesus himself saying that what you do unto the least of my brethren you do unto me.
Somebody of Michael Clarke Duncan's size and build is not going to get too many really good roles and he certainly hasn't played anything remotely like John Coffey again. Parts like that don't come along and the film seems almost to have been built around him. It's one of the most moving performance that has ever been put on film in history. And it's an incredibly difficult role, he's meek for his size and Uncle Tom like, but as we learn far from it. In fact Coffey is beyond what the ordinary human mind can comprehend. Duncan received one of four Academy Award nominations that The Green Mile got, in his case for Best Supporting Actor. Since the film is built around him, my only question is why was it the Supporting Actor category?
The Green Mile was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay, but did not come home a winner in any of these. A pity that one of the best films of the Nineties could not get at least one Oscar.
Where there's a Christ-like figure you also have some devil spawn villains and we have a pair of them in Sam Rockwell as another death row prisoner and David Hutchison as a rat of a prison guard with both connections and issues. What happens to them is both poetic and diabolical in true Stephen King tradition. Others in the cast of note are Bonnie Hunt as Mrs. Hanks, James Cromwell and Patricia Clarkson as the warden and his wife, David Morse and Barry Pepper as two other guards on the block and Michael Jeter as another prisoner with a remarkably trained 'circus' mouse.
The Green Mile is a remarkable allegorical picture and might be considered for Easter time viewing if it has a season. It certainly will make folks think.