OF MICE AND MEN
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
OF MICE AND MEN is a film directed by Gary Sinese, from a screenplay by Horton Foote, based on the novel by John Steinbeck. It stars Gary Sinese, John Malkovich, Sherilyn Fenn, Ray Walston, Casey Siemaszko, and Joe Morton. Rated PG-13, due to mature themes, brief violence.
OF MICE AND MEN was first adapted to the big screen in 1939 in a film directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr., and music by Aaron Copeland, a mere two years after the novel's publication. The story was adapted twice for TV (once with Robert Blake and Randy Quaid, once with George Segal and Nicol Williamson); it was also made into a opera that was produced twice by Seattle Opera. The script for this newest version was written by Horton Foote (THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL), who downplays the novel's political subtext, a call for a humane socialism where people take care of one another. Instead, Foote's version is content to redefine the human condition on the individual level only. This new version does succeed in capturing Steinbeck's special feeling for the land. The film was stunningly photographed in California's Santa Ynez valley, a rolling land of golden grass and live oaks.
This film marks the introduction of director-star Gary Sinese as one of the future lights of Hollywood. Sinese founded the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in the Seventies. It was there that he and John Malkovich first played George and Lennie in 1980. As a director Sinese shows a spare, delicate style. As George, the smaller, smarter migrant worker who has fallen reluctantly into the role of Lennie's protector, Sinese is especially sympathetic and effective.
As Lennie, the child-like giant, John Malkovich presents a more problematic performance. Malkovich is a star, not a character actor. We are watching a star do a star turn when we watch Malkovich parade his formidable and showy arsenal of shtick, the hands floating, bouncing, the mouth in search for a shape, the stutters, shambling walk. These things might have worked brilliantly on stage, but on the big screen they serve only to draw attention to the actor, not the character.
On the other end of the end of the scale is the wonderful Ray Walston as Candy, the withered old hand whose old dog foreshadows the eventual culmination of the story. Walston, perhaps best known to many as Uncle Martin in that silly old TV series "My Favorite Martian", and who had a brilliant career in musical comedy in the Forties and Fifties (SOUTH PACIFIC, DAMN YANKEES), registers a heartbreaking performance as the old man who says, "I wish someone would shoot me when I'm of no use anymore. But they won't, they'll just send me away."
Among the other noteworthy performances are those of Casey Siemaszko as the brutish Curly, Sherilyn Fenn, his unnamed wife, and Joe Morton as Crooks, the broken stable hand. Fenn in particular presents a new take on her character. The wife in this version is far more dangerous and predatory than in Steinbeck's novel. Initially acting quite sluttish, she shows us eventually to be naive, lonely, and trapped in an abusive marriage; she acts as a voice for a feminist consciousness that probably never occurred to Steinbeck. Likewise, the wonderful Joe Morton (BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET) begins as the brutally, cruelly angry Black man, eventually shows his pain and loneliness. Both of these unhappy people are brought out of their shells in contact with Lennie, the confessor who understands almost nothing they tell him, so they can tell him anything.
I recommend OF MICE AND MEN without reservation even at full price. It is visually beautiful. It is thematically intelligent and important. It is sensitive to its source and the debut of a great new movie talent. Really, you must go.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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