Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #331: The Green Mile

Stephen King is known around the world for his tales of horror and the supernatural, but every now and then he can write very compelling tales of drama and hope. Two of them are set in a prison and were adapted to the screen by director Frank Darabont. “The Green Mile” (1999) was the second adaptation after “The Shawshank Redemption” and stars the late great Michael Clark Duncan as John Coffey, a giant of a man on death row in 1935 Louisiana. Ironically for a man condemned to die, Coffey has the power to restore life.

This film was a holiday film released in December and it eventually became part of one of my family movie nights. Back in the early 2000s when my family and I were living in Lima, Peru, my dad bought the VHS, I am guessing after he had seen the movie in theatres and liked what he saw. This was right around when I was starting to develop my love affair with cinema, so just seeing that new box was enough to make me excited. I do mean box, because you will recall with a movie 188 minutes long they had to split the movie into two videocassettes. Oh, the good old days of VCRs.

The story is told in flashback by a man (Dan Greer) living in a retirement home. After seeing a movie that brings back painful memories from his past, he decides to share his burden with a fellow resident by telling her about the time in his life when he was a death row correctional officer in 1935. Back then Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) ran what the guards of Cold Mountain Penitentiary called the Green Mile, because of the color of the floor the inmates had to walk before sitting on the electric chair.

Edgecomb runs the place in an orderly fashion along with men he trusts to do their job professionally: Brutus “Brutal” Howell (David Morse), Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn) and Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper). Together they keep watch over men whose days are numbered. Edgecomb demands they behave as though this was not a prison block, but a hospital with terminally ill patients, unless those patients cause trouble.

Three new characters disturb the balance on the Mile. New guard Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison) is a sadistic little a-hole, who has no respect for the prisoners or his fellow guards and only got the job because of his connection with the governor. This is only a temporary situation until he gets a cushy desk job at a mental institution. When he mishandles the procedure for an execution, it leads to one of the most disturbing scenes ever shot involving an electric chair.

Then there is prisoner “Wild Bill” Wharton (Sam Rockwell) a felon who causes no end of troubles for the guards, including urinating on Terwiliger. In response, Edgecomb gives permission to Terwiliger to spray Wharton with a fire hose and then lock him up in a dark room while strapped in a straight jacket. You break the rules on the Mile, you have to pay the price.

The character who causes the most profound change on all of the guards is John Coffey (Duncan), a gigantic man found guilty of killing two young girls. Yet after meeting Coffey for the first time, Edgecomb develops doubts as to the man’s guilt. Despite his considerable size he never hurts any of the guards, which he could easily do with a swat of his massive arms. He even asks Edgecomb if they keep the lights on at night because he is afraid of the dark.

Things take a supernatural turn when Coffey grabs Edgecomb and seems to suck out the illness out his body. For weeks he was suffering from a painful urinary infection, making a trip to his outdoor bathroom an unbearable journey. Yet after being healed by Coffey he can finally have sex with his wife (Bonnie Hunt) literally from dusk till dawn. As his wife says they hadn’t had that much fun since they were 19. It’s a miracle.

Any movie set on death row will have characters asking themselves questions about mortality, but what are the guards to do with a man who can delay death with a touch of his hands? The men who arrested Coffey said it as though he dropped out of the sky. Could he have come from above? If so, what will happen to the man who ends his life?

This is the role for which Michael Clark Duncan will be remembered and it is indeed a memorable role. In a film filled with acting heavy weights such as Tom Hanks, Sam Rockwell and James Cromwell as the prison warden, Duncan managed to stand out with his performance, earning him an Academy Award nomination. With a body like that, it was easy for Duncan to play tough guys or villains, yet he managed to play the most innocent man to ever walk on death row.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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