Movie Plot
The Green Mile is a story told in flashback by an elderly Paul Edgecomb in a nursing home. He tells a friend about the summer of 1935 when he was a corrections officer in charge of Death Row inmates in Louisiana's Cold Mountain Penitentiary. His domain was called "The Green Mile" because the condemned prisoners walking to their execution are said to be walking "the last mile" here, on a stretch of green linoleum. The main feature of the cellblock was "Old Sparky", the electric chair.
One day, a new inmate arrives. He is 7 feet tall (about 2.13 meters) John Coffey, a black man convicted of raping and killing two young white girls. Upon being escorted to his cell, he immediately demonstrates a "gentle giant" character--keeping to himself, afraid of the dark and being moved to tears on occasion. Soon enough, Coffey reveals his extraordinary healing powers by healing Edgecomb's urinary tract infection and resurrecting a mouse. Later, he would heal the terminally ill wife of Warden Hal Moores (James Cromwell). Although it is clear that Coffey has a degree of control over his power, when asked to explain it, he merely says that he "took it back."
At the same time, Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), a violent, sadistic, and potentially mentally ill guard who takes pleasure in intimidating and injuring inmates, exasperates everyone else in the cellblock. He "knows people in high places" (he was the nephew of the governor's wife), in effect preventing Edgecomb or anybody else from doing anything significant to curb his deviant behavior. Wetmore recognizes that the other officers greatly dislike him, and uses that to demand being promoted on managing the next execution. After that, he promises, he will have himself transferred to an administrative post in the Briar Ridge mental hospital, and Edgecomb will never hear from him again. A reluctant agreement is made, but Edgecomb comes to regret it after Wetmore deliberately sabotages the electrocution, inflicting as much pain as possible on Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter), a Cajun inmate who had previously embarrassed him.
John Coffey (Duncan) being escorted to his execution by Edgecomb (Hanks) and Brutus Howell (David Morse).Meanwhile, a violent prisoner named William Wharton (Sam Rockwell) arrives, due to be executed for multiple murders he committed during a robbery. At one point he seizes Coffey's arm, and Coffey senses that Wharton is the true killer of the two girls, the crime for which Coffey was falsely convicted and sent to death row. Coffey then uses his powers to compel Wetmore to empty his handgun into Wharton, after which Wetmore falls into a permanent catatonic state. Stunned by these events, Edgecomb queries Coffey, who says he "punished them bad men", then takes Edgecomb's hand and imparts the vision that he saw of what really happened to the girls, a vision that Edgecomb finds nearly unbearable to endure. Wharton is dead at Wetmore's hand, and Wetmore ends up as a patient at the very asylum to which he promised Edgecomb he would transfer.
Notwithstanding Coffey's incredible abilities and the wrongness of his conviction, he ends up being executed, due in large part to the racism prevalant at the time and place of the story (the movie was set in the Depression-era American South). The proper story ends there, and Edgecomb says he subsequently transferred from Death Row to a youth detention center, where he spent the remainder of his career. The story then returns to the present, where Edgecomb explains to his friend why he is able to remember the events of 1935: he is in fact 108 years old and still in excellent health. This is apparently a side effect of the life-giving power of Coffey's touch: a significantly lengthened lifespan. Mr. Jingles, the mouse resurrected by Coffey, is also still alive but Paul believes his outliving all of his relatives and friends to be a punishment from God for not stopping Coffey's execution. Mr. Jingles, being a mouse, should only have had a maximum lifespan of 1 or 2 years, yet he has lived for over half a century, so Paul dreads to think how long he himself has left to live, being a human. As he puts it, he has deep thoughts about how "We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green mile is so long."
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