Tag: Stephen King

Rapid Response: The Green Mile

I was wondering why I had waited so long to see “The Green Mile,” possibly because it has become TNT fodder, possibly because the critical through-line on it has been that it’s “The Shawshank Redemption” with magic, and possibly because it’s on that list of potentially overhyped IMDB Top 250 movies. But none of those reasons really justify how much I loved it.

Now granted, it has its flaws, but whereas “Shawshank” is a much more hopeful movie about survival and perseverance, “The Green Mile” has a wholesome spirituality that wins you over with its inherent goodness. Ultimately, its characters are flawed and even cruel and sadistic, but only one of whom do we really dislike and feel is in the wrong. Director Frank Darabont’s gift is in making a film that embraces its fantasy head-on to make for a wonderfully moving tearjerker.

I myself did not know about the film’s fantasy element, so I will not spoil it here, but it involves the miracles surrounding a massive death row inmate named John Coffey (the late Michael Clarke Duncan) and the prison’s head guard, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks). The movie approaches the giant that is Coffey with the same trepidation that a person would walk the Green Mile before being executed, so it’s a patient film that takes its time over its three hours and allows us to savor every moment. Coffey’s story is one of deep anguish, and in a way, he’s the real emotional center of the film, not Paul.

Paul’s problem involves dealing with one of his prison guard colleagues, the pestilent and cowardly Percy (Doug Hutchison), who is the mayor’s spoiled nephew and feels entitled to be an arrogant little shit. He just wants to see one of these guys cook up close, and he even wants to know what it is to torture someone in one gruesome death sequence. What I like about Percy’s character, if anything, is that as vicious and awful as he is, he reveals himself as ultimately human, pissing his pants out of terror in one scene and revealing that he’s not entirely one-dimensional. We get a sense that he doesn’t entirely deserve the cruel, ironic fate he receives in the end.

Part of me believes that because Paul and his fellow guards are no saints either. They put Percy and their most difficult inmate, Wild Bill Wharton (Sam Rockwell), through both mental and physical brutality. But these characters’ flawed depth allows Hanks to exhibit deep, everyman pain and guilt as only Hanks can. His final conversation with John puts an insurmountable amount of emotional pressure on him that I hadn’t previously imagined.

Some of the scenes, such as the flashback to John’s murder, the execution scene of Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter), and the present day tags with Paul as an old man, are a bit heavy-handed and even unnecessarily long, but I’ll remember “The Green Mile” for its more serene moments, not its twists. The use of “Cheek to Cheek” in “Top Hat” is an absolutely beautiful capper. Seeing the mouse Mr. Jingles fetch the thread spool is one of those all time great movie moments. And the rest of the movie is not short of miracles, big or small, either.

Rapid Response: Misery

Rob Reiner’s Misery lacks the psychological depth of Stephen King’s novel.

MiseryposterI’d like to see “Misery” remade today with a cute comic book fangirl holding Alan Moore or Stan Lee hostage or something. I think just doing that alone might open up the story to more of a discussion of obsession and fandom than Rob Reiner’s film does, or perhaps for that matter Stephen King’s novel.

The film is famous for Kathy Bates’s marvelous ability to flip a switch between feelings of serendipity and sadism, but it never uses its full potential to explore the psychological realms of depth that must be going through these two characters’ heads.

The story is well-known, namely because it is a strong one, and “Misery” is nothing if not a well made, genre thriller. Paul Sheldon (James Caan), a famous author of trashy romance novels, gets into a nearly fatal car wreck and is rescued by his number one fan, Annie Wilkes (Bates). She nurses him back to health but makes clear before long that she will keep him in her small, reclusive home until he rectifies the troubling ending to his latest book.

But ultimately, this punishment is too one-dimensional. Paul has done nothing wrong, so this is not a morality tale. And Annie is just an insane serial killer with an unhealthy obsession. The movie doesn’t ask why she singled out Paul’s Misery novels, and it doesn’t even seem like she is some perverse mastermind with sinister motives to hold him there from the very beginning. She’s only driven by passion and nothing specific. I most wondered about the dinner scene where Paul attempts to poison Annie by pouring medicine in her wine. She spills her cup and pours a new glass, but was that an accident, or did she know what Paul was up to? The movie is vague, and never leads us to believe that Annie is anything more than what’s on the surface. It’s less Hitchcockian and more the story of someone trapped in an unfortunately macabre situation. Maybe that’s King-ian. I wouldn’t know.

I kept wanting to know what was going through Paul’s mind. We see him by himself a lot, but he doesn’t share his thoughts with us the way he might through internal monologues in a book. I would bet that being forced to write a new Misery novel after he has cast off the series would be some kind of torture, but the movie shows him cranking it out in a montage in a determined escape attempt.

Part of the reason I asked myself such questions is because Reiner’s camera forces us into a heightened sense of awareness from the get go. The film’s first shots are extreme close-ups of a cigarette and a bottle of champagne, and a simple Google search will show just how many starkly centered images of Bates’s face are everywhere. Except none of it has a deeper meaning. None of it clues in to suspense the way Hitchcock might with such blatantly obvious shots.

“Misery” doesn’t seem like it’s made by a man who is out of his element, even though Reiner’s previous films included the romantic comedies “The Princess Bride,” “The Sure Thing” and “When Harry Met Sally” and the fake rockumentary “This is Spinal Tap,” but he also doesn’t seem like the master director that would best fit a story as psychologically dense as King’s.