In 1935, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is the head guard of E Block at Cold Mountain Penitentiary in Louisiana—death row, known to the men who walk it as “the Green Mile” for the color of the linoleum floor that leads from the cells to the electric chair. Paul is a decent man in an indecent job. He has walked dozens of condemned men to their execution. He does this work with as much humanity as the system will allow—ensuring each prisoner is treated with dignity on the walk, managing the practical mechanics of death with a kind of horrified professionalism. He does not enjoy his work. He believes in it the way people believe in things they cannot think of an alternative to.

Paul’s team of guards includes Brutus “Brutal” Howell (David Morse), whose nickname is ironic—he is the gentlest man on the block, a former football player whose size masks a quietly compassionate temperament. There is Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper) and Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn), both reliable men. And then there is Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), the governor’s nephew, who took the job on death row not despite the executions but because of them—a small, cruel man who uses his political connections as a shield and who derives visible pleasure from the suffering of prisoners. Percy is the kind of person every institution produces and protects: someone who should never have been given power over anything, let alone human lives.

Into this world comes John Coffey.

He arrives in chains. He is enormous—the largest man any of the guards have ever seen, with hands like dinner plates and a body that fills the cell doorway. He has been convicted of raping and murdering two young white girls, twin sisters, in a small Louisiana town. He was found in a field, holding their broken bodies, weeping.

He is also afraid of the dark.

This is the first thing Paul notices. This giant of a man, convicted of the most monstrous crime on the block, asks—with the politeness of a child—whether the light can be left on at night. He is quiet. He is gentle. He cries easily and often. He speaks simply, with a formal courtesy that belongs to a much older and more innocent time. He introduces himself the same way every time: “John Coffey, like the drink. Only not spelled the same way.”

Paul cannot reconcile what he sees with what the file says. And then John Coffey touches him.

Paul has been suffering from a severe urinary tract infection—debilitating pain that makes every movement agony. One night, Coffey reaches through the bars of his cell, grabs Paul’s hand, and pulls him close. What happens next is not medicine. It is something else entirely. Light emanates from the point of contact. The pain leaves Paul’s body. It enters Coffey’s. Coffey convulses, opens his mouth, and exhales a swarm of dark particles—like insects made of shadow—that dissolve in the air.

Paul is healed. Completely.

This is John Coffey’s gift and his curse. He can absorb the suffering of others into himself—physical pain, disease, even death itself—and expel it. He can heal through touch. He can also transmit what he absorbs: visions, sensations, the truth of what happened to the people whose pain he carries. He is, in the vocabulary of the story, a miracle. In the vocabulary of theology, he is something closer to a Christ figure—his initials are J.C., and this is not accidental.

The other inmates on the Mile include Eduard “Del” Delacroix (Michael Jeter), a Cajun man convicted of arson and murder, who has befriended a mouse he names Mr. Jingles—the mouse performs tricks, runs through a spool, becomes the only joy in Del’s diminishing life. There is Arlen Bitterbuck (Graham Greene), a Native American man whose quiet dignity makes his execution one of the film’s most restrained and devastating scenes. And there is William “Wild Bill” Wharton (Sam Rockwell), a young psychopath who arrives feigning sedation and explodes into violence the moment his restraints are loosened—a man who lives for chaos and cruelty and who, the story eventually reveals, is the actual killer of the two girls.

The film builds through a series of events that test Paul’s sense of what is right, what is just, and what is possible.

Coffey heals Mr. Jingles after Percy, in an act of casual sadism, stomps the mouse to death. Coffey cups the broken creature in his enormous hands and breathes life back into it. The guards watch. They do not understand. They begin, slowly, to believe.

Del’s execution becomes the film’s most harrowing sequence. Percy has been assigned to lead the execution—and Percy, who has tormented Del throughout his time on the Mile, deliberately sabotages the procedure. In a proper electrocution, a wet sponge is placed on the prisoner’s head beneath the electrode to conduct the current quickly and ensure death is as fast as possible. Percy places the sponge dry. The result is prolonged, unspeakable suffering—Del does not die quickly. He burns. He screams. His body catches fire. The witnesses vomit and flee. The guards are sickened. Percy watches with satisfaction. Del dies praying the Hail Mary in Cajun French—Michael Jeter’s improvised final performance, a moment of genuine spiritual grace amid manufactured horror.

The guards are forever changed by what Percy has done. They are also changed by what Coffey can do. They face a choice: Warden Hal Moores (James Cromwell) has a wife, Melinda (Patricia Clarkson), who is dying of an inoperable brain tumor. Paul believes Coffey can heal her. But Coffey is on death row. Taking him out of the prison is a crime. Everything about the plan—drugging Percy, restraining him, smuggling Coffey through the night—is illegal and would end their careers.

They do it anyway. They drug Wharton, straitjacket Percy, and drive Coffey through the darkness to the warden’s house. Coffey enters the bedroom of a woman he has never met and draws the tumor out of her body through his mouth. The disease enters him—and when they return to the prison, Coffey transfers the sickness into Percy, who goes mad and shoots Wild Bill Wharton dead before collapsing into a permanent catatonic state.

Justice, of a kind, has been served—but not by the system. Not by the law. By a condemned man whose gift allows him to see the truth of things and whose compassion compels him to heal even at the cost of his own suffering.

And then comes the question the entire film has been building toward: Paul knows Coffey is innocent. He knows Coffey has the power of God—or something like it—in his hands. He knows that executing this man is not justice but murder. What does he do?

He asks Coffey. He says: I can open the door. You can walk out. I’ll tell them you overpowered us. We’ll take the punishment. You can be free.

Coffey’s answer is the film’s theological center. He says: “I’m tired, boss. Tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand?”

He does not want to be saved. Not because he doesn’t value his life—but because his gift, the very thing that makes him miraculous, also makes existence unbearable. He feels everything. Every cruelty, every act of violence, every moment of suffering on earth enters him like shrapnel. He has been carrying the world’s pain since birth. He wants to put it down.

Paul walks John Coffey down the Green Mile. The guards are weeping. Coffey asks not to have the hood put over his face because he is afraid of the dark. His last request was to watch the film Top Hat—Fred Astaire dancing, Ginger Rogers floating, a world of lightness and grace and beauty that has nothing to do with death row or suffering or the ugliness of human cruelty. He watched it with the guards sitting beside him, all of them together in the dark, and it was the last good thing he saw.

The execution proceeds. The guards throw the switch. The lights go out across the prison. John Coffey dies.

The film’s frame story reveals that Paul Edgecomb, having been touched by Coffey’s healing power, has been cursed with an unnaturally long life. He is now 108 years old. He has watched everyone he loved die—his wife, his children, his friends. Mr. Jingles, the mouse Coffey healed, is still alive too, aged and ancient, kept in a small box. Paul’s gift of extended life is also his punishment: having killed a man with God’s power in his hands, he must endure the consequences for what feels like eternity. “We each owe a death,” Paul says. “There are no exceptions. But oh God, sometimes the Green Mile seems so long.”

Content Breakdown

Language: Severe by frequency. The F-word is used throughout, particularly among guards and prisoners in the death row setting. Racial slurs including the N-word appear, consistent with the 1930s Deep South setting. The word “retarded” and “faggot” are used by cruel characters. Context: “The language is period-appropriate and character-specific. The most offensive language comes from the most offensive characters—Percy Wetmore and Wild Bill Wharton—and the film treats their language as markers of their cruelty, not as casual vocabulary. For students in this curriculum, the language is inseparable from the setting: this is what death row in Depression-era Louisiana sounded like. The racial slurs in particular should prompt discussion about how language dehumanizes—which is precisely what the film argues Coffey’s treatment represents.”

Violence: Severe in specific sequences. The botched execution of Eduard Delacroix is the most graphic scene—prolonged screaming, visible burning, the smell commented on by characters afterward. Other executions are shown but handled with more restraint. Wild Bill Wharton’s sudden violence (attacking guards, grabbing people through bars) creates genuine shock. A man is shot. The discovery of the murdered girls is shown briefly—Coffey holding their bodies in a field, covered in blood. Context: “The violence is not gratuitous—it is the point. The film is about what the death penalty does to everyone involved: the condemned, the executioners, the witnesses, the institution. The botched execution scene is deliberately unwatchable because it should be. Darabont forces the audience to sit through what Percy made Del sit through. For students who have discussed capital punishment through Dead Man Walking earlier in this objective, the Del scene provides visceral understanding of what abstract moral arguments actually mean in practice.”

Sexual Content: Moderate. The rape of the two girls is central to the plot but never shown—referenced in dialogue and in the image of Coffey holding their bodies. Wild Bill Wharton makes crude sexual remarks and gestures. A brief scene of implied sexuality between Paul and his wife. A guard urinates on himself during a tense standoff (played for shock rather than humor). Context: “The sexual violence is handled with restraint—its horror communicated through consequence rather than depiction. The film never shows the assault on the children. For this curriculum, the handling itself is instructive: Darabont demonstrates that the worst acts can be conveyed through their aftermath, not their enactment.”

Substance Use: Beer drinking among characters, no one intoxicated. Context: “Minimal and incidental to the story.”

Mature Themes: Capital punishment and its moral costs, racial injustice in the American South, the relationship between innocence and guilt, institutional cruelty versus individual compassion, the burden of supernatural empathy, abuse of power, the theological problem of executing a holy innocent, mortality and the fear of death, the cost of doing the right thing within a wrong system, grief, friendship across racial lines in a segregated society, the “magical Negro” trope and its implications. Context: “This is the most morally complex film in Objective #28. It asks students to hold multiple contradictions simultaneously: a just man executing an innocent man, a healer who wants to die, a system designed for justice that produces only suffering, guards who love their prisoner and kill him anyway. These contradictions are not resolved by the film—they are its subject.”

Why This Film Works for Developing Unconditional Love and Compassion

After Dead Man Walking (compassion for the guilty), Good Will Hunting (compassion for the guarded), Les Misérables (compassion as chain reaction), and Babette’s Feast (compassion through action without recognition), The Green Mile teaches the hardest lesson of all: what happens when compassion encounters a suffering so vast that it cannot be fixed—only shared.

John Coffey’s gift is compassion made literal. He does not choose to feel the world’s pain—he cannot stop feeling it. Every act of violence, every cruelty, every moment of human ugliness enters him involuntarily, like a radio that cannot be turned off. His healing ability is the flip side of this curse: because he absorbs suffering, he can remove it from others. But it passes through him. Every healing costs him. He does not get to put the pain down. He carries it until he can expel it—and even then, the memory of what he felt remains.

This is the film’s contribution to Objective #28: unconditional love is not free. The previous four films have shown compassion as practice (showing up), as patience (repeating truth), as chain reaction (passing grace forward), and as anonymous service (giving without recognition). The Green Mile shows compassion as burden. Coffey loves unconditionally—literally cannot stop loving, cannot stop feeling, cannot stop absorbing the world’s suffering—and it is destroying him.

His request to die is not despair. It is exhaustion. “I’m tired, boss. Tired of people being ugly to each other.” This is the voice of someone who has loved the world so completely that the world’s cruelty has become physically unbearable. The question the film poses to students is devastating: if compassion means feeling what others feel—truly feeling it, not as metaphor but as lived experience—can a person survive that level of openness? And if they cannot, is the compassion still worth it?

The film answers yes. Not because Coffey’s life ends well—it ends in an electric chair, convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, mourned by a handful of guards who couldn’t save him. But because every person Coffey touched was changed. Paul’s infection was healed. Mr. Jingles was resurrected. Melinda Moores was saved. Del was treated with dignity in his final hours. Even Percy and Wharton received a kind of justice. Coffey’s compassion rippled outward exactly the way the Bishop’s candlesticks did in Les Misérables—except Coffey paid the price not with silver but with his life.

For students in this curriculum, The Green Mile asks them to confront the uncomfortable truth that sits beneath every lesson about compassion: it costs something. The people who feel most deeply, who love most openly, who absorb the world’s pain most completely—these people suffer. The film does not romanticize this suffering. It does not suggest that Coffey’s pain was noble or worthwhile from Coffey’s perspective. From Coffey’s perspective, it was agony. The film argues that the compassion was still real, still transformative, still essential—and that the world was better for it, even though the compassionate person was broken by it.

This is the truth about unconditional love that Hallmark cards and motivational posters leave out: it is not always sustainable. It is not always survivable. Sometimes the most loving people are the most damaged people, because love without boundaries means pain without limits. The Green Mile asks students not to look away from this.

Characters as Individuals

John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) is the film’s moral center and its greatest challenge—a character who must be simultaneously the most powerful and the most vulnerable person on screen. Duncan achieved something extraordinary: he made a 6’5″, 300-pound man seem fragile. His Coffey speaks softly, moves carefully, weeps openly. The gentleness is not an act or a pose; it is the involuntary expression of a nervous system so sensitive that it registers every human emotion in its vicinity. Duncan drew on the pain of his own father’s abandonment and his love for his mother to find what his acting coach Larry Moss called “Little Mike”—the wounded, tender core beneath the physical enormity.

The Christ parallel is explicit and intentional—J.C., healer, innocent condemned, choosing to die rather than flee. But King and Darabont complicate the allegory. Coffey does not die to save humanity. He dies because humanity’s cruelty has exhausted him. His sacrifice is not redemptive in the traditional theological sense; it is an escape from an empathy so total it has become torture. This makes Coffey a more human and more heartbreaking figure than a straightforward Christ analogy would allow.

Duncan said of the character: “John Coffey stands for everything that is right in the world.” The actor’s own gentleness—universally attested to by every person who worked with him—infuses every frame. When Duncan died of a heart attack in 2012 at age 54, the tributes echoed the very qualities he brought to Coffey: kindness, warmth, emotional transparency, generosity of spirit. He was the role.

Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is the film’s conscience—a man who must reconcile his duty with his growing certainty that the system he serves is murdering an innocent man. Hanks plays Paul with characteristic integrity, suppressing his natural warmth behind the institutional mask of a corrections officer who has learned to compartmentalize. The performance is in what Paul doesn’t say: the pauses before he speaks, the way his eyes track Coffey with increasing wonder and dread, the moment he realizes he will have to execute a man he loves and respects. Paul is the character students will identify with most directly—the decent person inside a system that demands indecent things.

Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison) is the film’s embodiment of cruelty—not as aberration but as institutional product. Percy didn’t invent his sadism. The system gave him access to vulnerable people and protected him from consequences through his family connections. Hutchison plays Percy with a small-man viciousness that makes the character physically repulsive—he takes pleasure in others’ fear, torments Del’s mouse, deliberately botches the execution. Percy represents what happens when power is given to people who want it for the wrong reasons—and his eventual fate (absorbing Coffey’s expelled disease, going permanently catatonic) reads as poetic justice so extreme it borders on the cosmic.

Eduard “Del” Delacroix (Michael Jeter) is the film’s most vulnerable human character—a small, nervous Cajun man whose crime (arson that killed people) is real but whose personhood is equally real. Jeter hired a dialect coach, developed Del’s mannerisms, and improvised his death scene—praying the Hail Mary in Cajun French as the botched execution burns him alive. The mouse Mr. Jingles is not a cute movie gimmick; it is the last thread connecting Del to the experience of love. When Percy kills the mouse (temporarily, before Coffey’s intervention), the violation is not of an animal but of a condemned man’s final comfort.

Brutus “Brutal” Howell (David Morse) is Paul’s moral mirror—a man whose physical capacity for violence (he is immense) is matched by his emotional capacity for tenderness. Morse plays Brutal as the kind of man every institution needs and rarely deserves: someone who does difficult work without becoming hardened by it. His nickname, intended as irony by his colleagues, captures the film’s broader argument that the gentlest people often wear the roughest exteriors.

Wild Bill Wharton (Sam Rockwell) is chaos personified—a remorseless killer who functions as Coffey’s negative image. Where Coffey absorbs suffering, Wharton creates it. Where Coffey is empathetic to the point of self-destruction, Wharton is entirely without empathy. Rockwell plays him as a rattlesnake in human form—unpredictable, dangerous, entertaining himself with cruelty because nothing else interests him. His eventual revelation as the true killer of the Detterick twins completes the film’s argument about how injustice works: the most dangerous person on the Mile is the one nobody suspected.

Themes for Deeper Discussion

Compassion as burden:

Coffey’s gift is also his suffering. The capacity to feel what others feel is not presented as a superpower but as a form of torture.

Discussion questions:

• Coffey says he is “tired of people being ugly to each other.” What would it be like to feel every act of cruelty in the world? Is this gift or curse?
• Paul offers Coffey freedom. Coffey declines. Is this a brave choice or a defeated one? Can it be both?
• Think about people you know who are highly empathetic—who absorb others’ emotions easily. What are the costs of this sensitivity? How do they protect themselves?
• The film suggests that the most compassionate person in the story is the one who suffers most. Is this always true? Does compassion have to hurt?

Innocence and justice:

The system executes the wrong man. The guards know it. They do it anyway.

Discussion questions:

• Paul and the guards know Coffey is innocent but cannot prove it within the legal system. What should they do? What would you do?
• The film never shows us a trial—we only see the result. What does this omission tell us about the justice system?
• Dead Man Walking (the first film in this objective) shows the execution of a guilty man and asks whether compassion is still owed. The Green Mile shows the execution of an innocent man. How do these two films talk to each other?
• Wild Bill Wharton is the actual killer but is on death row for a different crime. Justice catches up with him through Coffey’s transferred disease, not through the legal system. What does this say about human justice versus cosmic justice?

The “magical Negro” critique:

The film has been criticized for depicting a large, simple-minded Black man whose miraculous abilities exist primarily to serve white characters.

Discussion questions:

• Is this critique fair? Consider: Coffey has no backstory, no family, no inner life beyond his suffering. He exists in the story to heal white people and then die. Does this reduce him?
• Michael Clarke Duncan’s performance gives Coffey enormous emotional depth. Can a powerful performance transcend a problematic archetype?
• Compare Coffey to other Black characters in the films you’ve studied this year. How does representation shape which stories get told and whose suffering is centered?
• Stephen King wrote Coffey as a Christ figure—innocent, healing, condemned. Does the theological intention excuse the racial implications? Can a character be both a meaningful allegory and a harmful stereotype?
• Duncan said Coffey “stands for everything that is right in the world.” How does the actor’s own interpretation of his character affect how we should read it?

Institutional complicity:

The guards are good men working for a bad system. They participate in executions they know are unjust.

Discussion questions:

• Can you be a good person inside a bad system? Do the guards’ individual acts of kindness redeem their participation in state killing?
• Percy is protected by his family connections despite his incompetence and cruelty. Where do you see this dynamic in institutions today?
• Paul’s extended lifespan—his “punishment” for executing Coffey—suggests the universe holds individuals accountable for institutional acts. Is this fair?
• Think about systems you participate in that you believe are flawed. How do you balance working within them against resisting them?

Visual Literacy

Darabont’s Vision

Understanding the directorial choices deepens appreciation:

The Green Mile itself: The corridor of green linoleum that connects the cells to the execution chamber is the film’s central visual metaphor—a path that can only be walked in one direction. Darabont films it repeatedly, from slightly different angles, at different times of day and night, with different prisoners. Each walk is unique in emotional texture but identical in destination. The color green—conventionally associated with life, growth, renewal—becomes deeply ironic: this is the path to death. The production design emphasizes the corridor’s institutional anonymity; it could be a hospital hallway, a school corridor, any institutional space where human beings are processed. The ordinariness is the horror.

Scale and intimacy: Darabont uses the physical contrast between Duncan and Hanks—between the massive prisoner and the ordinary-sized guard—to create a visual paradox: the most powerful person in every frame is also the most powerless. Coffey towers over everyone, yet is caged, chained, condemned. The camera frequently shoots upward at Coffey from Paul’s perspective, emphasizing his size, but Duncan’s performance makes this enormous figure radiate vulnerability. The visual grammar says: this man could break out of any cell, overpower any guard, walk through any wall. The emotional grammar says: he would never do any of these things, because he is the gentlest person in the building.

Light and darkness: Coffey’s healing manifests as light—literally, a warm glow emanates from the point of contact when he draws disease from someone’s body. The disease exits as dark particles, like black insects. Darabont makes the theological symbolism physical: healing is light, suffering is darkness, and Coffey is the conduit between them. His fear of the dark—so childlike, so incongruous in a man of his size—becomes a visual motif: when the lights go out at his execution, the screen goes dark in the most literal sense. The light has left the building.

The execution scenes: Darabont films each execution differently, establishing a spectrum of institutional death. Bitterbuck’s is quiet and dignified—as “good” as an execution can be. Del’s is nightmarish—the worst-case scenario of what happens when cruelty infiltrates the process. Coffey’s is devastating precisely because it is competent—everything is done correctly, humanely, by the book, and the result is still the murder of an innocent man. The progression argues that even a “well-conducted” execution is an abomination; the difference between a good execution and a bad one is cosmetic, not moral.

The frame story: The nursing home scenes—Paul as an ancient man, haunted, outliving everyone—are filmed in muted, washed-out tones that contrast with the saturated period palette of the 1935 sequences. This visual difference communicates that Paul’s present is less vivid than his past, that the events on the Green Mile were the most alive he has ever been. The tragedy of his extended life is made visual: the world has lost its color.

Creative Extensions

The letter: Paul Edgecomb executed John Coffey knowing he was innocent. Write the letter Paul might have written to Coffey’s memory—years later, decades later—trying to explain why he did it and what it cost him. What would Paul say? What could never be said?

The other side: We never learn Coffey’s full backstory—where he came from, how he got his gift, who he was before the arrest. Write Coffey’s story from his own perspective. What has his life been like, feeling everyone’s pain? What were the moments of beauty? What was the moment he broke?

The institutional question: You are a guard on the Green Mile. You know an inmate is innocent. The legal system has failed. You have no evidence that would hold up in court. What do you do? Write a moral argument for three possible courses of action: (1) follow orders and proceed with the execution, (2) help the prisoner escape, (3) refuse to participate and accept the consequences. Which do you choose, and why?

The burden of empathy: Coffey feels everything. Imagine you woke up tomorrow with this ability—you could feel the emotions and physical sensations of every person within a mile of you. Describe one day of this life. What would school feel like? What would your family feel like? How long could you endure it?

Representation and storytelling: The “magical Negro” critique asks whose stories get told and how. Rewrite one scene from The Green Mile from Coffey’s internal perspective—giving him the interiority the film sometimes denies him. How does the scene change when we see through his eyes instead of Paul’s?

Related Viewing

Other films about institutional injustice:

• The Shawshank Redemption (1994, R—language, violence) — Darabont’s first King adaptation; companion piece about survival and hope within a corrupt prison system; ages 15+
• 12 Angry Men (1957, Approved—no objectionable content) — The justice system examined from the jury room; essential for understanding how reasonable doubt works and fails; ages 12+
• Just Mercy (2019, PG-13) — Based on the true story of Bryan Stevenson’s work defending wrongly condemned prisoners on death row; direct real-world counterpart to the film’s themes; ages 14+

Other films about supernatural compassion:

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, PG) — Another story of an innocent being with healing abilities who is hunted by institutions; the children’s version of Coffey’s dilemma; ages 8+
• Edward Scissorhands (1990, PG-13) — A gentle, gifted outsider destroyed by the community he tries to serve; ages 12+

Other films about the death penalty:

• Dead Man Walking (1995, R—language, violent content) — The first film in Objective #28; companion piece that approaches execution from the chaplain’s perspective rather than the guard’s; ages 15+
• Monster’s Ball (2001, R—strong sexual content, language, violence) — The execution’s aftermath, told from the executioner’s family; ages 17+

The source material:

• Stephen King — The Green Mile (1996). The novel is richer in detail than the film—Paul’s narration from the nursing home is more extensive, the secondary characters are more fully developed, and the theological questions are more explicitly engaged. King’s prose style is deceptively simple (like Coffey himself), and the serial structure creates a reading experience of mounting dread. For students who connect with the film, the novel deepens every theme. King later called it one of his most personal works, despite its supernatural elements—a story about what it means to be responsible for someone else’s death.

Recommendation: Essential viewing for students aged 15+, with strong content warnings for the botched execution scene and racial language. This is not an easy film—at 189 minutes, it requires stamina, and the violence, while purposeful, is genuinely disturbing. But within Objective #28, it serves an irreplaceable function: it shows students that compassion is not comfortable. That feeling deeply is not a gift to be envied but a burden to be respected. That the most loving person in a room may also be the most broken person in the room. And that executing an innocent man is something the human conscience does not recover from—which is the film’s final, devastating argument against the death penalty, delivered not through polemic but through the simple, unbearable experience of watching good men do an unforgivable thing to someone they love.

Pair with Dead Man Walking for a complete examination of capital punishment from both sides of the relationship—chaplain and guard, guilty and innocent, the question of whether any human being has the right to end another’s life, regardless of what that life has or has not done.