The Green Mile Review

Frank Darabont gives death row a warm, burnished look through David Tattersall's camera and takes his time about it: 189 minutes, much of it guards and prisoners simply living alongside each other. The ensemble is the reward. Tom Hanks is decent and tired as Paul Edgecomb, David Morse is quietly excellent, Michael Jeter makes the condemned Delacroix and his trained mouse unexpectedly moving, and Doug Hutchison and Sam Rockwell play two different grades of vicious. The execution that Hutchison's guard sabotages with a dry sponge is one of the most horrifying scenes in any mainstream American drama.

The trouble is John Coffey. Michael Clarke Duncan earned his Oscar nomination by giving him real sweetness, but the script makes him a saint without an inner life whose purpose is to heal the white men around him, a portrayal some Black viewers found embarrassing even at the time. The miracles come with swelling Thomas Newman strings and literal flies, and the length stops feeling like patience in the last hour. Stephen King liked it and joked that it was the first R-rated Hallmark Hall of Fame production, which is exactly the problem and exactly the appeal.