THE GREEN MILE

There is a buzz about town for THE GREEN MILE as the deadline for 1999 Oscar consideration nears. The film stars TOM HANKS in another every man hero role, his trademark for which he has been rewarded by the Academy on two previous occasions. In this adaptation of STEPHEN KING'S 1996 bestseller, HANKS plays the head guard on a Death Row block, with a heart for the humanity of his work.

He and his men treat the inmates who await the electric chair, "sparky" as it is known, with a sense of compassion and dignity which is hard to fathom in prison guards as we know them. The central focus of the story is a particular inmate, JOHN COFFEY, played magnificently by MICHAEL CLARKE DUNCAN in what is remarkably his first starring role. It is 1935, COFFEY is black, and is caught holding 2 young white girls who had been raped and brutally killed. In typical lynch mob mentality, a Louisiana jury convicts him and sentences him to death, go figure.

We soon suspect COFFEY could not have committed these crimes, as he is as gentle and caring as a nun, and is afraid of the dark to boot. HANKS' character figures this out pretty quickly too, and learns first hand that COFFEY is something totally out of the ordinary. Like way out. TOM HANKS plays his cookie-cutter great job here, but it's getting a bit blasé. MICHAEL CLARKE DUNCAN is the real hero, and he is mesmerizing.

The rest of the performances are top notch, from DAVID MORSE who plays a tough guy prison guard with a brain, a heart, a sense of humor and a thing for fairness. Not a bad package, but for the total fiction. JAMES CROMWELL is in best supporting actor form here as the prison warden. Emmy and Tony winner MICHAEL JETER plays a death row inmate who steals your heart, if you can imagine such a thing, particularly when he teams up with a furry beast who steals the show on "the green mile". His ultimate conclusion in the film is as brutal and dramatic as anything I've seen on screen. GARY SINESE shines in a small part as the defense attorney who knows COFFEY is guilty. And HARRY DEAN STANTON is hilarious as TOOT-TOOT, a prison trustee, whatever that is. Even the film's antagonist, PERCY played by DOUG HUTCHISON elicits not only disdain and hatred, but also sympathy and pity, which is a credit to the job he does in the picture.

My only hesitation about the film, which has "flashes" of the STEPHEN KING marvel, is that the storytelling is somewhat inefficient. The film runs over 3 hours and there are scenes which are clearly superfluous. Do we really need to see the rehearsal of the electrocutions, and then see 3 more real ones? This story could have been told in 2 hours or less and it would have been much crisper. What is this madness now, that to be sheik, a movie needs to be 3 hours long? Not for me, thank you.