One way or another, we are all on death row, just for the simple fact that we are living, since the surest thing in life is death. So, Stephen King wrote a very well metaphor for a reflection on people's motivations in life, and what may come from our dreams and nightmares, depending on what we are doing from and for ourselves.

This is a story about people who were condemned to death and the guards who took care of them in the big depression times (1929 and so on) - right at times when many people committed suicide after losing everything. A time of depression is also a time which carries a need for reflection: people under depression have to consider the value of things looking at their past and their present.

It happens that officer Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) and inmate John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) come to establish a trust-based relationship after John Coffey shows a simple mind and a transparent heart, from the heights of his gigantic size. Then the other characters in the story - all of them daily involved with thoughts about life and death - give their contribution in order to pull ourselves to a world where we must realize that death is certain while life is always fragile enough to show us that it is wonderfully beautiful if we don't have a heart of stone.

The death row effectively seems to be a desert when the subject becomes showing that life is beautiful and must be valued. But since criminals are there, waiting nothing else than a premature death to pay for their crimes, there is not much that can be done except thinking about life, its frailty, and the consequences of our acts. Stephen King surely have this perception of a master of storytelling, since he is able to realize that flowers might blossom in the worst places in the world.

Having to face the proximity of death is, for almost everyone, a time when religious issues must be considered, religion itself showing plenty of examples from which we can take good lessons on how fertile is our soul when we have to consider carefully well everything we have done in order to define what we will do next. Religion itself comes with two meanings: religare, meaning "to link again," and religere, meaning "to re-read, to reconsider." So it should be natural that many people walking the last mile of life will somehow develop religious thoughts and feelings.

The desert hides a well somewhere; Robert Benigni says that it is possible to find beauty in life while waiting for death in a nazi prison, like he showed in his movie "Life is Beautiful." Stephen King says, in turn, that miracles can happen even in prison, from the hands of a giant who seems to be a dangerous killer. In the same way, one might look like a good guy while being a most evil person, wearing the mask of a sheep while being a wolf. It is the heart that counts, at the end, and we must weigh carefully our thoughts and actions since those will lead us to heaven or hell and we must acknowledge that, for psychological hell, as well as psychological heaven, can both happen while we're living and not only after this life.

This is a masterpiece of drama and it shows that love must be in every person's notebook next to any note that can be taken when considering life as a divine gift. A film worth every second.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older