Frank Darabont returns to SWS with The Green Mile, below the cut.

So, Frank Darabont hit bigtime success with his version of The Shawshank Redemption. Naturally a few years later, for his second stab at being director, he went back to the King-Prison-Story well to do The Green Mile.

Ok, so it’s not so ‘naturally’. Most directors don’t do back to back King films, as we’ve seen. But Darabont and King are apparently good friends; Darabont even did one of King’s ‘Dollar Baby’ independent movies; there’s a connection there.

And in any event, it paid off again, if less grandly; The Green Mile was generally well-received.

So, what’s it all about? The Green Mile is a period piece, concerning the summer of 1935 in some Deep South state (apparently the movie hints that it’s Louisiana, but it’s not explicitly named). Our main character, now an old man in a nursing home, recounts his days in 1935 heading up the guards running Death Row, and dealing with a series of men entrusted to their care (only to be killed, by them, later) as well as a horrific bladder infection, a friend’s ill wife, and a new sadistic prison guard, transferred in seemingly just so that he could kill another human being. All that before the strangest inmate he ever stood watch over arrives…

I can’t talk much more about the movie without spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you skip to the end.

Ok. The real story, beyond the day to day stuff, concerns the inmate John Coffey, who arrives that summer slated to die in the electric chair for the murder of two little white girls; Coffey, a gigantic black man, was found with the two girls dead in his arms, bloody, raped and murdered. So, given that, and this movie being set in The South, he’s very lucky not to have been lynched or torn apart by dogs or something.

Coffey at first seems to be a stereotypical gentle giant; perhaps even borderline retarded. He’s extremely subservient to authority, timid, even childishly afraid of the dark.

It shortly comes out, however, that Coffey has amazing powers; he can heal the sick, and even, in the case of a small mouse at least, revive the recently dead. When found at the scene, so to speak, with the little dead girls, he repeated over and over that he ‘couldn’t take it back’, which everyone thought was an admission of guilt; in fact, he was talking about a limitation on his power, that he can only ‘take back’ injury or death for so long after the event occurs. Coffey was, in fact, merely trying to help, but no longer capable of saving the girls in question.

Cutting straight to the chase, John Coffey is a Jesus figure. In fact, it’s strongly hinted that he is Jesus, returned to Earth after his crucifixion as a black man. (The reference to him ‘falling out of the sky’, in that he had no traceable past, was a bit blunt; far better are the inexplicable scars he carries all over his body, for which Coffey can’t account)

The movie generated some controversy over the apparent ‘Magic Negro’ figure that Coffey represents, but I am personally shocked that there wasn’t any racial backlash over Black Jesus. I mean, Morgan Freeman playing God in a comedy got some people very upset; here is a serious, dramatic Black Jesus portrayal. Considering that the state executes Coffey, it serves as a double insult to your crazy arch-conservative types in America, who are usually in favor of state sanctioned execution (which is particularly odd for Christians; I mean, their savior was unjustly executed, in the religious story anyway. One would hope for some empathy toward prisoners out of that)

I remember watching this on cable and not liking it as much, but for whatever reason, the Sunday we watched it I found it pretty powerful. Yes, Coffey is a bit one-dimensional, but I think it works; he’s merely the vessel for this *thing*, this far greater presence than himself, which occasionally peeks through the human skin it’s wearing as a disguise on Earth. There are occasional flashes of insight, and some almost Old Testament wrath, that speak to the real power behind the throne, so to speak. Does this enhance or detract from the ‘Magic Negro’ criticism? Personally I’m not sure. Coffey’s human agency is diminished, but he arguably doesn’t serve as a subservient character to the white narrator either. If you take that tack, then you’d have to say that Jesus was a ‘Magic Jew’ to the various gospel writers. That might be fair; a lot of Christians seem to take that view of their religion, that it’s all about them, their needs, their forgiveness. Accept Jesus in *your* heart and be saved, right? The social justice stuff can follow later, or so it appears.

So, yeah. I watched a movie about Jesus around Easter, and it was based on Stephen King. That’s pretty religious for an atheist actually. I liked it too, in spite of my burning hatred of Tom Hanks. Go figure.

Next Week: Hearts in Atlantis
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