Film review  

The Green Mile:

Unending miles of loneliness

By Dilshan Boange

he Green Mile stars Academy Award winner Tom Hanks in the lead role as Paul Edgecomb who in 1999 recalls his life when he was a prison officer in charge of death row inmates at Cold Mountain Penitentiary in the summer of 1935. Unlike the other guards at the prison, Paul is a sympathetic guard to some inmates.

The story centres much around John Coffey, a giant African-American man convicted of raping and killing two young white girls, who arrives in the prison, sentenced to death row. To the great surprise of the other guards and inmates, Coffey is soft-spoken, and an emotional person. Before long Coffey reveals what are extraordinary powers by healing Paul's urinary infection and resurrecting a mouse by a mere touch. Later, he heals the terminally ill wife of Warden Hal Moores.

Percy Wetmore, a guard who is a sadist with a fierce temper, has recently begun working in the death row inmates’ block. Although his fellow guards dislike him, they cannot get rid of Wetmore because of his family connections to the Governor.

He demands to manage the execution of a certain prisoner. But Wetmore then deliberately sabotages the execution. The result is a disturbing and dramatic malfunction to the execution, causing a very painful death.

Killer

A violent, psychopathic killer named, “Wild Bill” Wharton also arrives, to be executed for multiple murders committed during a robbery. At one point Wharton seizes Coffey’s arm, which causes Coffey to sense that Wharton is also responsible for the crime for which John was convicted and sentenced to death.

John “takes back” the sickness in Hal's wife and regurgitates it into Wetmore, who then shoots Wharton to death and falls into a state of catatonia. In the wake of these events, Edgecomb interrogates Coffey, who says he “punished them bad men” and offers to give Edgecomb a vision of what he saw.

Coffey takes Edgecomb's hand and says he has to give him “a part of himself” in order to show what really happened to the girls.

Dilemma

Edgecomb finds himself in an inner dilemma and asks Coffey what he should do? If he should open the door and let Coffey walk away. Coffey tells him that there is too much pain in the world, to which he is sensitive, and says he is “rightly tired of the pain” and is ready to rest.

The last request Coffey makes before his execution is to watch the film Top Hat. When Coffey is put in the electric chair, he, shedding tears, asks Paul not to put the traditional black hood over his head because he is afraid of the dark. Edgecomb agrees, and shakes his hand as a goodbye.

The story ends with Edgecomb recounting his story in an elders’ home. He tells his fellow resident Elaine that he was 44 years old at the time of Coffey’s execution, and that he is meaning that he is now over 108 years old.

This is apparently a side effect of John giving a “part of himself” to Paul. The end is one that evokes great sympathy for Edgecomb which shows that sometimes being destined to outlive everyone who was your family and relatives is also something of a sentence that has been imposed on him to serve. A condemnation to serve a life sentence of unending loneliness.