The Green Mile (18) General release
After Shakespeare, one of the most fecund sources of screenplay material over the past few decades has been the prolific output of Stephen King. While many of the King adaptations for cinema and television have amounted to mere dross, they have also yielded such arresting movies as Carrie, The Dead Zone, Stand By Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption and now The Green Mile, which was published in serial form over six paperbacks in 1996. Frank Darabont's second film as a director, The Green Mile has much more in common with The Shawshank Redemption, his first, than the fact that he adapted both from King stories. Both are period films set in American prisons and concerned with humanism and redemption. Both run much longer than the average feature film, with The Green Mile unfolding over a leisurely three hours and seven minutes. And both feature significant allusions to Hollywood icons - Rita Hayworth in the case of The Shawshank Redemption, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers in The Green Mile.
In the present-day sequences which bookend The Green Mile, an elderly man watching television in a retirement room is reduced to tears by the scene from the 1935 movie Top Hat in which Fred and Ginger perform Cheek to Cheek. This cues the extended flashback which constitutes the great mass of the film as the man, Paul Edgecomb, recalls traumatic events during the Depression when he served as the head guard on Death Row at the Cold Mountain penitentiary in Louisiana.
The Green Mile takes its title from the prison jargon for that stretch of green linoleum which runs down from the cells to the execution chamber and the electric chair. Played by a jowly Tom Hanks, the younger Edgecomb is a decent, compassionate man who is sensitive to the fates of the condemned inmates who, he advises a younger guard, should be treated as if they were in an intensive care ward. Edgecomb's life is transformed when he encounters John Coffey, a huge, towering, barefoot black man convicted of raping and killing two young sisters. Coffey, it transpires, is a simple, uneducated man who's afraid of the dark and whose body is scarred from the brutality he has experienced. He is also revealed to have healing powers, which are first demonstrated when he cures Edgecomb's urinary problems. It is no coincidence that this angelic gentle giant shares his initials with Jesus Christ, and his evident innocence of the crimes for which he has been sentenced to death presents Edgecomb and his colleagues with a moral quandary.
Coffey is sympathetically played by the remarkably expressive Michael Clarke Duncan, who has deservedly received one of the film's four Oscar nominations, which include best picture but not, for once, best actor for Tom Hanks, who delivers one of his affecting and authoritative performances here with the integrity and humanity of a latter-day James Stewart.
An exemplary supporting cast notably includes Doug Hutchinson as a sadistic, powerfully connected young guard; Bonnie Hunt as Edgecomb's loving wife and David Morse and Barry Pepper as his fellow guards; James Cromwell as the prison warden; Sam Rockwell as a psychotic inmate; and Michael Jeter as a doomed Cajun prisoner who forms a close friendship with a cute mouse he names Mr Jingles.
Affirming his skills as a cinematic storyteller, Darabont allows ample time and space to delineate and digest the drama's characters, situations and environments as the drama builds in compelling power. Its respectful, essentially old-fashioned approach to narrative over such an extended duration may deter some viewers, but it unfolds at such a perfectly measured pace and with such impeccable craftmanship that I was drawn to it all the way on seeing the film at the early hour of 9.45 a.m last week. The next day, hearing the news that a 62 year-old great-grandmother, Betty Lou Beets, had been executed - and had become the 120th person to die on Death Row in a Texan prison since George W. Bush became state governor in 1995 - made the film's detailed depiction of capital punishment all the more chilling: the scenes of rehearsal for an execution, the setting out of chairs for the "audience" who will witness it, the shaving of the roof of the prisoner's head where a wet sponge will be placed to draw electricity quicker to the brain. The sequence wherein this primitive ritual goes disastrously wrong is almost as harrowing as Kieslowski's dispassionate picture of a protracted execution in A Short Film About Killing.
The special effects employed to illustrate John Coffey's unique powers are among the few weak elements of the movie's spiritual theme, which is pushed so resolutely, the suspension of disbelief that's essential to its acceptance is eased. Like The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile emphasises the torment experienced by the bearer of such extraordindary powers, and like The End of the Affair, it is suffused with reflections on faith, hope and supernatural. As it happens, the first victim of the electric chair in The Green Mile is played by Graham Greene - the native American actor from Dances With Wolves, that is.
Three Kings (18) General release
The imaginative American writer-director David O. Russell follows Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster with his first Hollywood studio film in Three Kings, and in marked contrast to many other indie directors who sold their souls and originality to the studios, there is not a hint of compromise about this dark action-comedy set in the Iraqi desert at the end of the Gulf War. This is the flipside of the hyped-up CNN coverage by which the war was most prominently communicated to western viewers.
The dramatic focus of the film is on four US soldiers - played with panache by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze, the director of the imminent Being John Malkovich - all of whom are bored and disillusioned with their essential uselessness in a war fought by hi-tech specialists, and pestered by the media, personified in a pushy, self-important reporter played by Nora Dunn.
Strip-searching an Iraqi prisoner, the soldiers find a map wedged in his buttocks. It gives directions to a stash of stolen Kuwaiti gold bullion which the soldiers, none of them heroes in the Saving Private Ryan mould, seek out with zeal to steal for themselves. Their progress is made all the easier by the fact that the Iraqi troops are preoccupied with suppressing their own rebellious people - who had been encouraged by the US to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and then abandoned.
Although vehemently critical of US foreign policy, Three Kings is never preachy, and its abrasive humour has such a jagged edge that it makes the film's serious commentary on the war all the more pointed. Its cultural antecedents would include MASH, Catch-22 and Salvador.
One of the funniest scenes involves one of the Americans being interrogated by an Iraqi (Said Taghmaoui from La Haine) who blames racist Americans for what Michael Jackson has done to his appearance - which is as bleached-out as the surreal imagery with which Russell injects a manic, hallucinatory quality into his film. The comedy of Three Kings is ultimately the humour of desperation as the protagonists are plunged into bloody chaos and confronted with the palpable fears and horrific physical destruction of war - and unexpected crises of conscience - in this bold, accomplished picture.
Show Me Love (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The central character of this gritty Swedish movie is the shy, lonely 15-year-old Agnes (Rebecca Liljeberg), who is despairing because of her family's move to the small town of Amal, a place so suffocatingly boring that everything is out of fashion by the time it arrives there. Her disenchantment with the town is quoted in the film's original title, Fucking Amal, which has been changed to the utterly innocuous Show Me Love for release here, in Britain and in North America.
Agnes has much more on her mind as she copes with the dawning realisation of her lesbian urges and the crush she develops on the high school rebel, Elin (Alexandra Dahlstrom), one of the school's most popular girls who briefly and publicly kisses Agnes for a dare. However, as in the recent British picture Get Real, it is the more outgoing of the two would-be lovers who is the most nervous about facing up to her sexuality.
From this premise, first-time writer-director Lukas Moodysson - a 30-year-old poet with experience in short films - constructs an acute and revealing picture of teenage angst, the awkwardness of first love and the capacity for cruelty within young people. It consistently rings true as it builds to a protracted but brilliantly judged coming out sequence, and it is permeated by a freshness and honesty that's all too rarely found in the US teen movies which glut our cinemas.
