The Green Mile

* * *

Cast: Tom Hanks, David Morse, Michael Clarke Duncan, Doug Hutchison, James Cromwell, Harry Dean Stanton

Director: Frank Darabont

Rating: R16 (contains violence)

Running time: 182 minutes

Opens: Previews this weekend, opens next Thursday at Village and Hoyts theatres

Review: Greg Dixon

The prison drama, much like the courtroom drama, offers a rich canvas of possibility for writers, playwrights and film-makers.

Its frame is so simple, yet great and terrible things can be played out within it by encompassing, defining and interpreting a swath of human thought and action.

So it was with talented director Darabont's first film, the 1930s prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, an adaption - as is this, his second film - of a novel by bestselling horror writer Stephen King.

That story, told by a black man doing life, was of a wrongly imprisoned white man's struggle to survive and transcend the prison experience. It was an instant classic of its kind, speaking as eloquently to the mind as to the heart.

Though it mines the same genre and the same time period - the Depression era - The Green Mile isn't quite so fluent.

While it has been beautifully and painstakingly filmed and has a talented and well-chosen cast who deliver some marvellous and at times greatly moving performances, it impresses more as a heartwarming (despite the death row setting) parable than intelligent meditation.

Using a flashback framework, the story opens in the present, then looks back to 1935 when John Coffey (Clarke Duncan, in an Oscar-nominated performance), a child murderer, is delivered to a Louisiana prison's death row (called the Green Mile because of the floor colour).

Almost as soon as Coffey arrives to await his turn in the electric chair, known as Old Sparky, it becomes clear to the row's smart, humane head guard, Paul Edgecomb (Hanks, again the likeable Everyguy), that Coffey isn't what the courts think he is.

He appears to be a gentle giant who is afraid of the dark. But he is also capable of inexplicable, healing magic which leads to a series of sometimes moving climaxes (King wrote the story as a six-part experiment in serialised fiction).

Darabont's film, which has been nominated for the best picture and screenplay Oscars, certainly has something to say about those hoary old concepts of good and evil, of crime and punishment and, yes, about the death penalty.

Certainly, the barbarous nature of state-organised revenge is vividly depicted and its mad regimentation is nicely revealed in the mile's dress rehearsals, with the wonderful Dean Stanton as the ring-in.

But it is the metaphysical elements of the story, its fairytale nature, which rob it of reality and prevent it from being a great portrayal.

The Green Mile's heart is as big as that of the giant Coffey's. But its head is at times as simple-minded, though as well-intentioned, as that of the big man.

And be warned - it is just over three hours long. That's almost right for telling this tale, allowing breadth for nicely detailed storytelling. But the final half-our make it feel like too many miles.