To the unquestioning eyes that are content with the apparent order of what meets them and make not much effort to probe deeper, The Green Mile is a sentimental prison drama questioning the fairness of death row. The Green Mile, like other movies that delve into themes of race, injustice, death, innocence, and old age, defies reduction to a mere portrayal of the fairness of death row. Therefore, it is nothing but reductive to suggest movies that only concern themselves with the debates in and around the death penalty and select the ones that unquestionably take a position against it.
This list of movies can be complemented by The Green Mile. From movies with similarities in thematic expression to films that invite criticism in the same vein as The Green Mile, all have found a place in this list.
1. Kabuliwala (1957)
John Coffey’s beleaguered state is not so much connected with the reality of the crime that he is accused of as it is with the reality of the blacks in America. Bodily differences between John Coffey and the world that predominantly surrounds him— more specifically, the world of the whites— readily frame him as a criminal. In Kabuliwala, we see the same instance of bodily and cultural differences being exploited to form assumptions about the Other, here Rahmat. For their Afghan physique and characteristic attires made complete with robes and bags, Rahmat and the likes of him are a menacing presence in the middle-class Bengali localities of Calcutta.
Played by the inimitable Chhabi Biswas, Rahmat roams around the city at the risk of making the bhadralok community wince. The dominant culture’s aversion to these economic migrants is deep-seated, as is evident when Mini’s mother is fed juicy, unreasonable, and uncorroborated stories of kabuliwalahs befriending and stealing children by their maid.
The little Mini, with whom he forges the most unbreakable bond, initially acts in accordance with her cultural upbringing that despises and fears these Afghan ‘outsiders.’ However, Mini’s initial fear fizzles out, and she does not take much time to embrace him as a friend. Their friendship is founded on a wholehearted shared curiosity about the other, slaked by rampant questions from both sides rather than set-in-stone assumptions.
Kabuliwala insists on human delicacy and innocence as forcefully as it allows for human explosions of wrath at being mistreated. Rahmat is like John Coffey, but he is also what John Coffey falls short of– John Coffey is short of the anger that Rahmat has in abundance. This anger is the primal anger directed towards people who disavow his place on the land.
2. Aakrosh (1980)
That the downtrodden are always at a disadvantage from the modern justice system throughout the world is explored painfully in Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh (1980). Aakrosh has at its heart the consistent perturbation at the awareness that this is a cursed world of the mighty where justice is a bourgeois sham. Lahanya, an Adivasi (made even more haunting by the performance of Om Puri), is convicted of killing his wife (Smita Patil). A young lawyer, Bhaskar Kulkarni (Naseeruddin Shah), takes up his case. However, Lahanya has no wish for exoneration as he remains unresponsive to Bhaskar’s attempt to save him.
With Lahanya refusing to cooperate, evidence starts mounting against him. Later, Bhaskar, who has already been attacked for taking up Lahanya’s case, is slipped in the information regarding the real culprit. In the penultimate scene, an unspeakable act of violence puts a closure to and perhaps explains Lahanya’s silence. The only means to gain freedom from this cursed world is through death– for John Coffey, it is inviting death, and for Lahanya, it is becoming death itself.
3. Dead Man Walking (1995)
Through Christian ideas of redemption and morality, the film actually explores the general attitude towards the death penalty among the dominant White Americans. While certain movies like The Green Mile gaze straight into the eye of the American justice system that is informed by racial prejudice, with no black criminals to acquit, the attitudes around the death penalty shown here in Dead Man Walking might seem a little more abstruse. Nonetheless, they are very much present and alarming. Matthew Poncelet is a convict awaiting his execution due to his involvement in the rape and murder of a teenage couple. He writes to a Catholic nun, Helen Prejean, in the hope of a revised sentence.
The film deals not simply with the subject of the death penalty but also with the inclination of the American justice system to doling out the death penalty more vigorously to the impoverished. Pontello and many other inmates like him cannot afford an attorney, so Prejean arranges for an attorney who can take up his case pro bono. One cannot help but note the gross bias of the justice system in recognizing the same kind of crime of Carl Vitello, Poncelet’s accomplice, with life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.
The film also offers some explanations for the dominant political ideology that rallies for the death penalty as a means to serve ‘true’ justice. This is made clear when the father of one of the victims lets Prejean know that the people outside are mistaking her for a Communist due to her objection to the death sentence of Poncelet.
4. I Want to Live! (1958)
“I wanna thank the gentlemen of the press. You’ve chewed me up in your headlines, and all the jury had to do was spit me out.”
A list of movies like The Green Mile is incomplete without a mention of the film noir adaptation of Barbara Graham’s life, from being a paperhanger (slang for someone writing bad cheques) to walking blindfolded to the gas chamber, titled I Want to Live! (1958).
Barbara is exiled from the elite society for her records as a sex worker and a petty criminal. One day, one of her associates slips in her name to the police as a murderer of an old woman. The press, helmed by journalist Edward Montgomery, takes this as an opportunity to bank on her rap sheet to sell more papers. However, towards the end of the film, Montgomery’s sympathies sway towards Barbara, for his newspaper stories are no longer malicious scoops having shock values but sentimental pieces trying to reason her crime and attribute it to her tragic childhood.
The film is more than simply a ‘factual story’ iterated in an attempt to posthumously exonerate a woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Neither does it seem to concern itself so much with the debate over the appropriateness of the death penalty. Rather, the film can be watched for all the ways in which the media plays a role in convicting someone or, when the need arises, ‘changing the climate.’
5. Happy as Lazzaro (2018)
A review on Rotten Tomatoes on the film reads, “Rohrwacher’s film inventively examines how people react to innocence: how they exploit it, how they resent it, how they distrust it, and how that altruism somehow finds a way.” And I have found nothing more suitable to briefly explain my inclination to include it in a list of movies like The Green Mile. Lazarro’s innocence and purity are balked at. And, like Edgecomb, time is allowed to be pliable for him, as is evident by the mysterious pedaling back of his age.
The laborers at disposal in Inviolata are desirable for their innocence. Their perpetual state of indebtedness is a sum of all its innocent parts and components. The De Lunas have been able to tie the laborers to sharecropping because their minds are unmarred by the ways of the world. Central to the understanding that the world is exploitative is the awareness that the only way to march forward is to explore and cultivate that primal human innocence.
6. 4 Little Girls
The death of two white girls, for which John Coffey is wrongfully held, calls to mind the Birmingham bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four little girls. What strikes one the most is the contrasting urgency to find the killer. For the first, a black man is readily available for crucifixion despite the absence of foolproof evidence. For the second, the urgency to pin the blame on a black killer is supplanted with the urgency to frame black protestors on charges of violence.
Directed by Spike Lee, the documentary 4 Little Girls explores the incident of the bombing, a Ku Klux Klan terrorism, as a springboard to the Civil Rights Movement. Although a Klan member, Robert Chambliss, was indeed convicted, he was assigned life imprisonment only– way more frugal in intensity when compared to punishments reserved for blacks for felonies that are otherwise way less grave. However, as protestors, the Blacks were most conspicuously and severely punished.
In a notable feat, the film allows the appearance of the then Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. It puts the spotlight on him as he tries to wiggle his way out, even if utterly unsuccessfully, from his responsibility for the killing of numerous black people. Wallace attempts to exonerate himself solely, citing his friendship with a black man, but the palpable racial tension and skewed power structure in the frame are awkward and infuriating.
7. Anand (1971)
Paul Edgecomb: “On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why I killed one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? This was my job? My job?” Bhaskar: “No one will ever know the helplessness of a doctor– a helplessness that comes as part and parcel of his job. Oh god! This is unbearable.”
When seen as part of the list, Anand seems to be swimming against the tide of films that concern themselves with a crime of a certain degree or death sentence or the institutional racism and xenophobia that pervades humanity. However, interestingly, Anand is the first film that springs to my mind seamlessly as a complement to The Green Mile. Far from being a crime thriller and with the melodrama acting solely as a uniting thread between the two, I consider Anand to be perhaps the closest to The Green Mile. Anand finds a place here as it is a meditation on death.
Anand has no one waiting on judicial death row, yet it is a story of death row. Like John, Anand’s purity and innocence make him impossibly overqualified to live in a cruel world. As a result, death is endowed to him not so much as a punishment. On the other hand, Bhaskar, like Paul, has to foster the helplessness of being incapable of saving the life of a friend, who was also ‘one of God’s miracles.’
8. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
The appeal for healing a world of frailty in The Green Mile finds an echo in Beasts of the Southern Wild. While John Coffey’s healing powers are used to fix the brokenness that emerges from skewed and unequal social constructs, with climate change being the main bugbear, Hushpuppy presses the idea that the healing of the biophysical world is evidently as urgent, if not more.
The agents of trauma remain the same in both cases. The system that has falsely framed John has also left Hushpuppy and her Bayou community to get submerged. Hushpuppy is feisty and undaunted. Yet, the revolution is fired by the responsibility of being tender to each other without ever losing the fire. “Y’all got to learn how to take care of people smaller and sweeter than you are,” Ms. Bathsheeba, Hushpuppy’s teacher, explains to the children who have just faced a near-death experience with the flood. The film allows for rage where rage is due and embraces what needs to be held close.
9. Being There (1979)
In certain ways, the otherworldly innocence of John Coffey also reminds me of Chauncey Gardiner from Being There. In Hal Ashby’s satirical comedy, American society’s petty delusions and pretensions are watched over by a simple gardener whose mind is a tabula rasa, gleaning knowledge from only the television. His relatively relaxed and elementary expositions of gardening, which demand no effort to be understood, are read by others as the carefully placed and supremely sagacious understanding of humankind.
Due to not being in contact with the outside world hitherto, Chance has managed to preserve his childlike state. However, his innocent utterances are also the ones that run the risk of being double innuendos. The film also leaves open the question of the true identity of Chauncey. It is for the viewer to deduce whether Chauncey is really a simple gardener or a miraculous force of God, like Coffey.
10. Bringing Down the House (2003)
The Green Mile has repeatedly been read as a tutelary spirit preserving the long-standing Hollywood trope of the ‘magical Negro’, a term developed by Director Spike Lee. The magical Negro is a numinous phenomenon, a Black admired for resurrecting the Whites who have gone astray. One can investigate a constellation of movies like The Green Mile while further investigating the cultural ramifications of racism. Bringing Down the House is a case in point.
Peter Sanderson is a tax attorney who tangles himself up with Charlene, an African American woman falsely convicted of robbery. While Pete is tasked with expunging Charlene’s record, which was never dirty, to begin with, Charlene aligns the workaholic Peter with his true potential and saves his relationship with his family. However, to gain a beneficial end result in this ‘rescue operation,’ a series of cover-ups has to be made to conceal Charlene’s true identity and her association with Peter, a white man who has to be answerable to quizzical gazes.
“You obviously have pockets of intelligence, so why do you walk and talk and act the way you do?” Peter asks Charlene, hinting at the latter’s perpetual state of submission for the greater good of the story. Thus, Peter and Charlene’s friendship is a double-edged sword—the edge of the black-white union sufficiently hides the prices that the black pays to sustain the union.
