Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...style that looked spare in one movie can feel bloated in the next. That's the case with The Green Mile, reverently taken from King's serialized novel. It's 1935, and we're on a Southern prison's death row, where the only recreation is watching a mouse commandeer the corridor. Enter a new inmate, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a giant black man with a gift of preternatural empathy; he can literally suck the pain out of people. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), the chief guard of E Block, is in awe of this white magic. He benefits from...
John Irving's rural sprawl of a novel becomes, in his screenplay, a small epic with subtle strengths. The setting is harsh--a Maine orphanage in the early '40s, with war and sexual abuse looming--but the mood is warm and precise, as a flinty, laudanum-addicted doctor (the excellent Michael Caine) tutors his brightest charge (Tobey Maguire, the most watchful of young actors) to be his protege. Hallstrom, here as in My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, lets the characters carry the story without allowing the actors to push too hard. This...
...began life as a (possibly fictionalized) diary by its heroine and has since been a novel, a movie, a Broadway musical, a movie version of that musical and an animated feature. It is now back to being a straight movie--without songs, without the Small House of Uncle Thomas ballet (thank God), but with a lot of exotic spectacle and a rather murky colonial confrontation that gives Jodie Foster, playing Anna, a chance to behave like a slightly prissy but good-hearted 20th century liberal...
...race. To Lurie, this is at first incomprehensible. He still needs to have recourse to avenues of escape from realityphysical pleasure; a fantasy about writing an opera on the poet Byron and his mistress Teresa; a longing for a former, more heroic self; anger and outrage. But the novel traces the process whereby he is able to find his own way of expiating his abuse of power and his guilt at being useless to his daughter and thereby is able to confront reality...
...While Coetzee develops brilliantly the white characters in the novel, there is something disturbing about the one dimensionality of all of the black characters. Petrus in particular never becomes anything more than a stereotype of the newly empowered yet still angry black man, and the seeming shallowness of his value system is chilling. Yet perhaps Coetzee keeps Petrus at a distance to make us realize that despite Lucy and David's liberal attitudes to the new South Africa, the damage done by years of oppression will not just disappear. And they will not be spared the revenge...