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'The Green Mile' has Oscars locked up

Five years ago, Frank Darabont's prison drama "The Shawshank Redemption," which he wrote for the screen and directed, garnered seven Academy Award nominations.

Now, once again adapting Stephen King's material, Darabont has created "The Green Mile," a powerful, moving and transcendent piece of filmmaking all but guaranteed to bring in as many nominations this time around.

What's the reason? Perhaps it's the film's lead actor, a guy named Tom Hanks. Or maybe it's the abundance of phenomenal supporting roles - most notably by Michael Clarke Duncan, who plays the monstrously big, yet overwhelmingly passive death row inmate John Coffey. Duncan and others actually make Hanks look like just another actor. Or it could be Darabont's skillful and masterful direction that makes this lengthy three-hour opus move along with the speed of a Gap commercial, or perhaps his gift for writing dramatic and poignant scenes.

For all these reasons, "The Green Mile" has not let down all those movie lovers across the country who have been awaiting Darabont's sophomore effort more fervently than a death row inmate awaiting a governor's pardon.

Plot wise, the film follows Paul Edgecomb (the flawless Hanks), a death row prison guard who is suffering from the worst urinary infection of his life. When a towering convicted murderer of two young girls, John Coffey ("Like the drink only not spelt the same"), played with delicate grace and gentleness by Duncan, comes under his watch, things begin to change.

Coffey harbors some mysterious powers that change all of those who work on the "Green Mile," the guards' name for the last mile a prisoner walks to his execution, so- called because the floor is the color of faded limes.

At its simplest, the story is about the conflict between good and evil and what it means to be either one of those. Darabont (and by extension, King) utilizes a prison death row to belie the assumptions of society in that the prisoners are often more compassionate and good than the men who guard them.

Percy Wetmore (an impressive Doug Hutchison) is an abusive mean-spirited guard with ties to political powers who works on the Mile only for the thrill of seeing someone die, and serves as a contrast to the Hanks' empathetic Edgecomb and Clarke's saintly prisoner.

"The Green Mile" employs the themes of mysticism, religion, goodness and justice to narrate a tale where the good are redeemed while the bad do not go unpunished. It is a film that is surprising without being tricky, ironic or reevaluating itself at the end in a "Sixth Sense" way. It's refreshingly optimistic (a characteristic few fall movies have been this year) and magical in its presentation.

Its one and only flaw lies in the frame story with Hanks as an older man at a retirement community. It is needless in the beginning and in the end, it creates revelations that go against the spirit of the film and cause everything to seem corny. Yet this is no more than 15 minutes of three hours and everything that falls between is too good to be marred by it.