<i>Green Mile</i>age
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
