Pulls The Heart Strings

The Green Mile - Film - 1999

The Green Mile is based on death row in 1930's. The film follows the head prison guard Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) and his guards who, get affected when a new prison inmate John Coffey "like the drink but not spelt the same" (Michael Clarke Duncan) whom is scheduled for execution as he has been convicted of murdering two young girls. 

The film starts off showing Paul in a nursing home going for walks to a cabin everyday. He is caught getting emotional over a film and Elaine Connelly (Eve Brent) finds him and he tells her his story. This film is based upon a short story by Stephen King. 

As the story begins you really have no way of knowing where it is going. There are others inmates on death row and you see the trials the guards are put through with them before the final execution of John Coffey. 

Tom Hanks gives an astounding performance, you can feel what he feels, think what he thinks. There was never any doubt in my mind throughout the film that I was watching a small part of Paul Edgecomb's life. The only person that maybe takes the gauntlet from Tom is Michael Clarke Duncan and how he manages to portray his giant of character as a small, terrified mouse. All of the support actors such as David Morse, Doug Hutchinson and Michael Jeter as just as good, they all portray their characters with real feeling. There are some extremely heartfelt moments and the actors pulled off these moments without a hitch. 

The story of the film is, well there are just no words to describe it, something I would expect as it is based off a Stephen King story.

This movie managed to do something very few achieve, make me want to cry. 

The film  comes in at just over three hours so it is something you have to be invested however, not once during the film did I think this is dragging, or I looked at the time. I was hooked for the whole time which is another achievement after the likes of Avatar three hour films are not normally in repertoire. 

There really is not much else to say about this film, it was moving in all the right ways and the cast was something that you don't find very often. For an old film it has aged well in terms of story and because there are no real special effects there is nothing to hinder the film in the modern age. 

10/10 - I would be hard pushed to justify a lower score for this film... I will now go and read the story it was based upon