Of Mice and Men
Screenplay by Horton Foote
Based on the novel John Steinbeck
Directed by Gary Sinese
With Gary Sinese, John Malkovich, Sherilyn Fenn, Ray Walston, Joe Morton
At Greater Union Pitt St, Sydney
Reviewed by Max Lane
A strong film of a marvellous book. Well acted by everybody in it, and told with an appropriately subdued style, Of Mice and Men is a moving depiction of human beings threatened with the loss of their most precious belongings: their lives and their friends.
It is the story, in particular, of two workers, the intellectually retarded Lennie (John Malkovich) and his friend George (Gary Sinese). The viewer warms slowly to the relationship, but in the end is deeply convinced by the performances.
Visually, the film captures the natural beauty, the colours, the idyllic feeling, that Steinbeck described in his picture of the farmlands where the story unfolds.
The story of this relationship is also the story of powerlessness of all the people who had nothing but themselves and, if any, their friends. They are Candy (Ray Walston), gammy-handed farm worker nearing the end of his working life and therefore the end of a livelihood; Crooks (Joe Morton), a disabled black man condemned to a lonely prison on the farm; Curly's wife (Sherilyn Fenn), the unnamed, lonely and abused wife of the brutish and cowardly boss's son.
The helplessness of Joe and Lenny, or rather the stark and painful reality that all that they had was themselves, is the central problem of the film. Their relationship is a mirror for the condition of all those around them, except the landowner and his son. Joe and Lenny are threatened with the loss of life and each other, the protection against loneliness which their friendship is. The landowners have no friends, not even in their wives, and their loneliness is assuaged by power and property.
The one disappointment is that the sympathy and empathy for the wandering, unemployed workers of the Great Depression that is so central to much of Steinbeck's works, including Of Mice and Men, is not fully integrated into the story. The fact that they have nothing except each other is present and provides the basis of the power of the film. But it is there mainly as a statement of fact.
In the novel, Steinbeck uses the story of the dream of buying a small farm to bring out the desperateness of the characters' situation. For some reason, the film omits both George's pessimistic reflections about the inevitability of the failure of this attempt and Crook's observations:
"You're nuts ... I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them. They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Everybody wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land."
To this extent, the story of George and Lennie loses some of its emotional impact and its deeper social message. All the same, this is a good film, worth going to see.