Green Mile - 1999

This blog post is not a review or a plot description, this is a record of how the movie made me feel.

I have not seen this or even read about it. For some reason, I thought was a war movie. I loved the way the older man in the nursing home, Paul Edgecomb (Dabbs Greer), gets out and walks, it grabs my attention and I want to know more.

The TV scene at night with all the residents of the home was interesting. The men are all on our left, women on the right, while Paul is sitting next to Elaine.

I really enjoyed the scene when young Paul, (Tom Hanks) first meets John Coffey, a giant of a man. Unlike the last movie I watched, Vanilla Skies, this one is making sense, and a genuine plot is emerging.

The mouse scene really cracked me up. When I was in college I was sharing a huge apartment with four other guys. One of them was not the tidiest guy in the world, in fact Chip's bedroom looked a lot like the storage room in the prison where the mouse would disappear. One day, a mouse came into our apartment. We were chasing it hoping to put back in the wild area, (our apartment was next to the Rappahannock river). Any way, we weren't able to catch the mouse and he made it into Chip's room, we all looked at one another and shrugged. Funny thing is we never did see the mouse in our apartment again.

The mouse in the movie does come back and in more than one way than one.

The execution chamber scene was really tough. The movie makes really easy to dislike Percy, (Doug Hutchinson), dude is messed up.

Things take an interesting turn after that. The plot still remains on track, but the character interactions continue to deepen and I keep getting sucked in. For ten years of my life I was an active member of a Kairos prison ministry team. It is fascinating, the first time you go in, they are all really big and scary. Then you start to get to know them. And you get to watch their interactions with each other. Prison or not, people form relationships and over time and through shared experience they deepen. I find I am happy when the good guys score and quietly cheer when the really bad people have really bad things happen to them.

The I'm tired speech really hit me between the eyes, I could completely empathize with John. The last 4th of the movie really pulls you in.

This is the part where I stop, it seems to be a good movie though a bit sad. But then, death row in the 1930s is going to have a lot of sadness; I think the actors and directors all handled it well. I really appreciated the touch Tom Hanks put into his character.


 I am glad this movie is in my library and fully expect to watch it again.