Top 100 Movies Of The 1990's: #53 The Green Mile
Box Office: $136.8 Million
Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Michael Clarke Duncan), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound
Oscar Wins: None
MovieRankings.Net: 91/100
Available To Stream: Amazon Prime ($4)
Some stories aren't meant to be movies. They need more time to breathe. The Green Mile is a very good movie but it would have been a great mini-series or even a full season on HBO. To Frank Darabont's credit, this doesn't feel rushed even though the book is over 600 pages. It's just insanely long at over three hours.
I love this book so much. The way Stephen King released it was especially cool. He broke it up into 6 parts and released one part a month over the spring/summer of 1996. Each section was just under a hundred pages and I would devour it. I remember being so excited for the next part to show up at Waldenbooks at the Fox Run Mall in Newington, NH.
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Archive Photos. Getty Images.When the movie was released, it came out at the end of 1999 (just like #54 Man On The Moon and #98 Any Given Sunday). It obviously made a lot of money but it still got lost in the shuffle of all the great movies that came out in 1999. It's clearly one of my favorite movies of the 90's. However, it's not even the best Stephen King prison movie of the decade directed by Frank Darabont.
Darabont's career is frustrating. He's only directed four movies. His Stephen King adaptions range from brilliant to very good: The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist and this. The only other movie he directed was The Majestic which is a mess but still has some good moments. I know he did get frustrated with the Hollywood system. He created the television version of The Walking Dead and then AMC fired him from it because they were being cheap. He also wanted to make a Civil War movie that he could never get funding for.
All of this is a shame. The Green Mile is a perfect example of that Darabont can do so well. It's a beautiful film to look at despite it taking place on death row. The Thomas Newman score is perfectly executed. Finally, the performances and casting are all home runs. Look at that cast even beyond Tom Hanks. No one knew who Sam Rockwell, Doug Hutchison or Michael Clarke Duncan were. All three are fantastic in the movie. Rockwell's wild overreacting is a perfect counterbalance to Hanks, David Morse and Barry Pepper being so stoic. Hutchison is a weird creep in real life but he's also the perfect villain in this.
Michael Clarke Duncan is so great in this. The sadness in his eyes at the pain around him. How happy he'd get with the small things in the world. It's a pretty fantastic performance in a part that could have gone very badly. You have to believe he is capable of supernatural things or the whole movie goes awry.
This book is in a similar situation to something like The Stand, which is my favorite book of all time. You could never tell that story as a stand alone movie. They tried a mini-series in 1994 and that was this weird combination of great performances (Gary Sinise, Rob Lowe) and cheesy (Molly Ringwald). CBS also did a longer mini-series as well that had the misfortune of telling a story about a plague during COVID. I want to see an HBO treatment or a Lord of the Rings situation where they can tell the story over 3 or 4 movies.
We just need Frank Darabont to direct it.
53. The Green Mile
54. Man On The Moon
55. Boyz N The Hood
56. Grosse Pointe Blank
57. Independence Day
58. The Rainmaker
59. Go
60. The Firm
61. Magnolia
62. The Talented Mr. Ripley
63. Tommy Boy
64. The Usual Suspects
65. In The Line Of Fire
66. My Cousin Vinny
67. Awakenings
68. JFK
69. Toy Story
70. Home Alone
71. Jerry Maguire
72. Titanic
73. Billy Madison
74. Apollo 13
75. Braveheart
76. Edward Scissorhands
77. Cape Fear
78. The River Wild
79. What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
80. 12 Monkeys
81. Stir Of Echoes
82. Mission: Impossible
83. Total Recall
84. Quiz Show
85. For Love Of The Game
86. Being John Malkovich
87. Men In Black
88. Scream
89. Alive
90. Three Kings
91. Glengarry Glen Ross
92. Die Hard With A Vengeance
93. The Blair Witch Project
94. Twister
95. Dirty Work
96. Election
97. Tremors
98. Any Given Sunday
99. The Wedding Singer
100. Clerks