“Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got,” DH Lawrence once wrote. “Very few people really feel love, or sex passion, or kindliness, or anything else that goes at all deep. So the mass just fake these feelings inside themselves. Faked feelings! The world is all gummy with them.”
The Green Mile – which has Oscar nominations for best film, best sound, best screenplay adaptation and best supporting actor (Michael Clarke Duncan) – is sentimental, and not just because it stars Tom Hanks as a prison guard, playing another of his nice American Everyman roles. It’s sentimental because it manipulates us into feeling a great deal, then leaves us red-eyed in the foyer, wondering if our emotion has any value.
The Green Mile is set in a death row prison block in Louisiana in 1935. A man mountain of a black prisoner is brought into a cell to await execution for the rape and murder of two white girls. Frank Darabont’s film affects to be challenging by confounding our expectations about the milieu in which it is set. The prison guards (all white) are good and non-racist, apart from one crudely drawn baddie. The black inmate, John Coffey (Duncan), is set up as an ogre, but turns out to be an innocent with magical powers. Despite several electric chair executions shown in purportedly upsetting detail, this is not – unlike Dead Man Walking – a film that proselytises against capital punishment.
In fact, for all its cunning confounding of expectations and provoking of emotions, it’s not at all clear what, if anything, the film is saying. And it takes a very long time to say it. Adapted from Stephen King’s six-part novel published in 1996, it is 188 minutes long. While it’s not as rambling as most recent King fiction, it still has more back story and leisurely character development than you could shake a stick at. There’s even a subplot about Paul Edgecombe’s (Tom Hanks’s) urinary infection, which, given that the film is long enough to warrant at least one trip to the loo, is a bold move. Never before has a lead actor been to the toilet so often in a movie; never before, I’ll bet, has a double Oscar winner been required to yell “I’m pissing razor blades” from his cubicle.
But really. What’s wrong with a good long sentimental film? You know, one of those that often involve Hanks or Meg Ryan or both. There’s a huge audience for this kind of blubbathon, for a Titanic, a Schindler’s List, a Saving Private Ryan or a Green Mile.
Darabont suspects that these audiences want to purge their emotions. And perhaps – contra Lawrence – it doesn’t matter too much what those feelings are about; to have them at all in the cinema is enough. “To me the core of film-making is to stir the emotions of the audience,” says Darabont.
He has written, produced and worked on many films but directed just two, the other being The Shawshank Redemption. Both are based on King novels, both are set in prison, both have redemptive, humanistic messages that have proved appealing and lucrative. Darabont is becoming a latterday Frank Capra, wallowing in sentiment in an unashamedly American way that makes snooty critics sniffy. His next film, which he hopes to shoot later this year, he describes as a Capra-esque romantic comedy set during the McCarthyite blacklisting in the Fifties. It will, he promises, be sentimental. “There’s nothing wrong with honest sentiment,” he says. “It’s a Wonderful Life is my favourite movie of all time, which should tell you something.
“Both films I have made are very moving,” says Darabont. “They both say something very positive about the human heart and I think it’s something people crave to hear.”
Even when Darabont (41) was a film student he was trying to make movies of King’s books: “I’ve always been drawn to his voice as an author. To me he’s up there with Dickens, who was a great populist storyteller.”
Doesn’t he think The Green Mile is too long, that the framing devices could have been cut, and that the execution scenes are self-indulgent? “No, and apparently neither does the audience in the US. It’s been a huge success,” he says, understandably defensive. “I can mention precious few great 90-minute movies, but I can reel off many great films that are three hours plus, starting off with Mr Lean’s work, Mr Kubrick’s work and Mr Cameron’s work.
“If you’re gonna go on a rich emotional journey with the storyteller, then you need to get to know the characters. I don’t think the boat started sinking until nearly two hours into Titanic. If the boat had started sinking after 30 minutes, I wouldn’t have cared as much about those characters.”
The Green Mile is, as Darabont recognises, a cunningly manipulative film. “Every frame of every movie is an attempt by the artist to manipulate the perceptions or emotions of the viewer. The point is, do you appreciate the manipulation or resent it? Do you notice it, or do you completely, blindly give yourself over to it?”
The problem is that the film constructs a reassuring moral universe out of what was a cruel prison system, and thus short-circuits our emotions, making them unproblematically uplifting and not worth reflecting upon. This, after all, was the South of Jim Crow, this was the penal system that used the chain gang, the whip and the club. Louisiana state penitentiary was one of the most violent penal institutions in America. Only last year a documentary called The Farm: Angola USA showed that racism was still rife there. Darabont’s film is seemingly oblivious to all this. Shouldn’t he have made a more substantial film?
Darabont believes he has. “I enjoy the fact that we might give the audience something to think about – the death penalty, race relations, miracles, our relationship with a higher power. But I don’t want to make up people’s minds for them. I love that we had an earlier era of films in which you would leave the theatre but not leave the movie behind. You’d go out with your friends and talk about it for three hours over coffee. I’m hearing from a lot of people that this is the effect it’s having and I think that’s wonderful.”
But what are they talking about? About racism in the US? Darabont thinks so. “With The Green Mile, King is saying something very compelling about the relationship between the races at that time. Maybe not just at that time, but forever. And the message is: don’t judge a book by its cover. There’s magic in all of us if you look closely enough.”
But that message is sentimental and expresses only a facile truth. And indeed, The Green Mile’s simplistic vision of the world is one in which the bad guys have shifty eyes and are sadistic to pet mice. It’s one in which black men cannot be allowed to be bad and white men cannot be racist. Consequently, racism is not treated seriously. Instead, Coffey is an instinctive healer who helps Hanks with his waterworks.
The Green Mile inhabits a soothing dreamworld in which audiences can experience strong yet vague feelings and leave the cinema thinking life is beautiful. The sentimentality is akin to that characterised by the philosopher Professor Malcolm Budd in his book Values of Art. Such sentimentality “involves the wilful neglect of various aspects of the target of the emotion that would necessitate a more complex and less rewarding response; a false intensity of experience is gained by ignoring any features that militate against the simple, one-sided response which typically idealises, glamorises or romanticises the target, making it tug at the heartstrings.”
And yet there is, and perhaps always has been, a big demand for such heartstring tugging. No wonder Darabont is keen to compare King to Dickens. “Dickens was a bleeding heart for humanism, he had a wide open heart for humanity. Now people are catching on to the fact that King is very much more like that than they thought, largely I think because of the film of Stand By Me and, I suspect, the films I’ve made.”
Darabont has undeniably caught King’s gushing humanism. When Coffey walks the Green Mile (the title is a reference to the colour of linoleum on the death row floor) to the electric chair, everyone on screen seems to be crying. Coffey is crying. The guards are carrying on like they’re Gwyneth Paltrow at Oscar time. Even Hanks’s chin is twitching. It’s Dickensian sentimental overload: like the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the scene. Or maybe I’m cynical.
Maybe not. I tell Darabont that the most affecting execution scene I have seen in film was in Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. A young man is hanged for the vile murder of a taxi driver. Has he seen Kieslowski’s film? Darabont admits he has not, but perhaps he should. It takes the viewer on an emotional journey at the end of which we question our feelings rather than merely have them and leave them in drenched Kleenexes on the cinema floor. And it makes us sit around over coffee for hours afterwards arguing about substantial things – about whether there is a moral difference between murder and state killings. DH Lawrence might have liked Kieslowski’s film but not, surely, Darabont’s.