Hi Elvis,
Regarding your ideas about other avenues that The Green Mile could have explored: Yes, yours would be a better, braver, picture. The way pop culture works, I think, is that the themes of small, cutting-edge pictures get watered down over years into large, cutting-board pictures, and we can see that process happening here. I have no doubt that the film’s portrait of race relations in Louisiana prisons in the 1930s is a fantasy (although no less a fantasy than the sentimentalized view of the Eddie Murphy-Martin Lawrence friendship in Ted Demme’s Life). Since all pictures are fantasies, some more than most, I think it is useful to look at The Green Mile in terms of what its viewers will see. Many of them will see not clichés and stereotypes but an enormously good black man whose fate they mourn. These viewers will be uninformed and unsophisticated in terms of the actual conditions in the South that your father described to you, but that is the nature of a society’s memory.
I had an interesting talk a few months ago with Peter Mayer, the former chairman of Viking/Penguin, who has published just about everyone. I asked him for the name of the best novelist on his list. Saul Bellow, he said. And then he mused that he wouldn’t call Stephen King a great writer in the same sense but would call him a great storyteller in the Dickens tradition (I am not using quotation marks because I cannot claim to remember verbatim). King is scorned by those who do not read him, he said, but is underrated and sometimes very good (he suggested I start with the short stories). In India recently, I went to every bookstore I could find, and even in stores the size of a broom closet in back alleys (where the proprietors surely stocked no book they were not certain they could sell), Stephen King was the second-most-stocked author. (The most popular was Wodehouse!) These were book stalls catering to Indians. I saw few tourists in Calcutta. Why do they read Stephen King in Calcutta? Because they want to.
No filmgoer attends a movie to “support” it. They choose a movie in the hope that for a period of time they will be more entertained or interested or happier than otherwise. Our job as critics is to encourage them to choose films that we think will be less a waste of their time than those they might choose on their own. This is a relative and inexact process, but worth doing. If we do not get up to our elbows in the real mix of real movies, real audiences, and real motives for going to the movies, what function do we serve?
In insular, media-obsessed, buzz-driven markets like New York, I wonder whether some critics, especially newcomers on the make, don’t position their reviews primarily to position themselves. The real reason Pauline Kael was revolutionary was that she wrote for actual moviegoers like herself, and evoked their needs and desires. No one who seriously believes Taste of Cherry or Ulysses’ Gaze is a great movie believes that being able to enjoy a movie is necessary to make that movie great. Oh, the admirers of those movies enjoy them, I suppose, but in a way so specialized and evolved that it has nothing to do with moviegoing as it is generally understood.
Many of the films on our 10-best lists will play only in the larger cities. I get e-mail from moviegoers who complain that Being John Malkovich, Boys Don’t Cry, Princess Mononoke, and American Beauty have not played in their towns. Topsy-Turvy certainly won’t, and probably not Magnolia. Subtitled films and documentaries may not play in their states. Dan Talbott of New Yorker Films told me the average subtitled film makes 85 percent of its North American gross in nine theaters.
Movies like The Green Mile are progressive compared with the movies most of America sees most weekends. The Green Mile is an important and worthy fact of popular culture–not sophisticated, not as hard-edged or accurate or courageous as it could be, but more a part of the solution than a part of the problem. Here is an obviously unprovable guess: For 50 percent of the people who see it, it will be the best movie they see all year, even from your point of view.
Best,
Roger
