I finally saw: The Green Mile

Here’s your more traditional “I Finally Saw” after the last one was about a movie that had only been out for a month.

The gaps in a person’s viewing history sometimes defy explanation. I have always loved Tom Hanks, I have usually prioritized the viewing of Stephen King adaptations (there was a time, 25 years ago, when I had read everything he’d written), and I've had a special fondness for Frank Darabont’s previous King adaptation, The Shawshank Redemption (a fondness I share with many others, so I guess not so special). And in 1999, I was well into the era of ranking the films I saw each year from first to worst, meaning I tried to see most significant releases.

Yet not until last Friday night did I see The Green Mile, the only one of five best picture nominees from that year I didn’t see in the year of its release.

It might have taken me much longer except that the movie came up in this monthly challenge I’m doing through the Flickcharters Facebook group. This challenge involves watching the highest ranked movie you haven’t seen on the Flickchart of another member of the group, chosen randomly each month. So far for this series I’ve seen The Court Jester, Europa Europa, Henry V (1944), Explorers and Naked, and The Green Mile was my sixth random pick. It’s been a pretty good series as Explorers was the only one I didn’t like all that much.

It’s possible that one of the reasons for the delay was that the movie cracks the three-hour mark, though if that were the reason, it had slipped my mind long before now, such that I was surprised when I learned it again. I figured the thing probably clocked in at 2:25 for something, but three hours? It’s listed as 189 minutes, but the credits start at 180. That’s Lord of the Rings territory, not the expected length of a little prison movie about a Magical Negro. (Sorry, not my term -- that phrase refers to an unfortunate trope of which The Green Mile is probably the textbook example.)

The thing that surprised me so much, when I did carve out the time to watch in on Friday, was how little it really is. The movie has no more than two or three sets, and only one that they visit with any regularity, that being the death row building itself. The action only leaves these couple locations on a couple occasions, and not for very long.

Yet three hours pass, and you know what? You don’t really notice it.

I almost got the feeling I was bingeing a miniseries about these characters rather than watching one long movie, both because you know you’re settling in for the long haul, but then also because it goes kind of quickly when you actually get down to it. (Hence the term “bingeing.”) The movie is kind of constructed as a series of relatively short episodes, as well. But it has an undeniable forward momentum and keeps trucking along without ever wearing out its welcome. In fact, I suspect the only reason I did finally take a “nap” at the 2:30 mark was because it was late on a Friday night and I was drinking wine. Otherwise I could have made it to the end no problem. I’ll nap during movies that are less than half that length.

And while I did like it quite a bit, it’s no Shawshank. It did feel kind of like Darabont’s apology for Shawshank, though. Who needs an apology for Shawshank, you might ask? Well, how about prison guards? Assuming such a vocal faction of prison guards that must be placated actually exists, which I’m sure it doesn’t, it seems like this is Darabont’s way of saying “See, not all prison guards are bad.” As a matter of fact, there’s only one bad one this time, whereas the other four are basically saints. In fact, three of those four – Barry Pepper, David Morse and Jeffrey DeMunn – are basically rolled up into one saintly character for how little individual distinction they are given by the script.

Which is another miraculous thing about this movie. How could it go for three hours and basically never really develop the characters?

And yet it doesn’t feel slow, and it does feel satisfying. Maybe I wanted to well up at the end – I had been promised tears – but the eventual fate of Michael Duncan Clarke’s character didn’t get to me, probably because the movie had done such a thorough job preparing us for what was going to happen, and that he was ready for it.

So, solid movie that I obviously should have seen long ago, and probably would have liked even a little bit better if I had.