Frank Darabont's The Green Mile (1999) is set on a death row in 1935 Louisiana. Its central figure is a man named John Coffey — like the drink, only not spelled the same — wrongly convicted of murdering two girls. His initials are J.C., and the film makes no effort to hide what it is doing. Coffey heals the sick by laying his hands on them. He takes their suffering into his own body, then expels it as a swarm of black flies. He fears the dark. By the end he is given the chair he did not earn, and he chooses to walk to it.
Critics have called this Christ-figure cinema and moved on. But the verse the film keeps quietly building toward is older than the gospels and more specific than the type. It is in Isaiah, in the same Servant Song that haunts so many crucifixion films:
"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted."
The Verb the Film Visualizes
The Hebrew verbs in this verse — nasa, to lift up or carry, and sabal, to bear a heavy load — describe a transfer of weight. The Servant takes onto himself what was on the ones he loves. Borne and carried are not metaphors here. They are the literal verbs of porters and pack animals.
The Green Mile films exactly that. Coffey does not pray for the sick to be healed. He does not speak a word of forgiveness. He places his hand on the body, draws breath in sharply, and afterwards looks ill himself. The illness is not gone from the world. It has been moved.
That is the most precise possible adaptation of he hath borne our griefs — and Darabont, whose surface is so careful never to over-preach, films it in long, almost wordless takes.
What the Film Adds to the Verse
The second half of Isaiah 53:4 is the harder line: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. The Servant's healing is misread. The crowd assumes he is the one being punished. They do not understand that he is the one bearing the punishment.
Coffey, in the film, is exactly that misread. The state has him on death row for a crime he did not commit. His size and skin make him, in 1935 Louisiana, presumed guilty. He has saved a child from a burning man's bullet, healed a man's bladder, and brought a mouse back from death — and he is the one strapped to the chair.
The film holds that injustice without resolving it. It does not have him exonerated. It has him executed. Like the verse, it leaves the audience to do the moral work.
Why He Walks
The most quietly devastating moment of the film is Coffey's last conversation. He says he is tired. He has felt the world's pain in his body, and he is willing to be done. He chooses the chair. He does not bargain.
This is the line of Isaiah 53 most viewers do not place. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. Coffey opens his mouth only to forgive Paul Edgecomb, the guard who must throw the switch. I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the times I've been alone.
The Forty Seconds
Read Isaiah 53:4 once, slowly. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. Forty seconds. In that time the film is condensed. The mile is green because the linoleum is green. The man who walks down it has been carrying things you could not see.
The healing is the spectacle. The carrying is the verse. Both happen in the same hands.