Of Mice and Men (1992)

(In French, On TV, April 2020) Generations of American high school students know all about John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, with its heavy mixture of depression-era vagrants, uncontrolled force, tough choices and titular mouse. As such, there’s a ready-made public for an adaptation, whether it’s to revisit a classic about which a substantial proportion of all Americans had to write an essay about, or post-1992 classrooms that might as well watch the film rather than read the novella. There had already been one movie version of the story in 1939, so this one had an opportunity to upgrade the craft of the film adaptation while remaining faithful to the text. Under director Gary Sinise (who also plays the quick-witted one of the duo), this take on Of Mice and Men succeeds at keeping much of the Steinbeck text while updating the classic film: the visuals carry some sort of gentle nostalgia for a less-complex time, the images are what we would expect of a period film, and both Sinise and John Malkovich (who plays the strong-but-slow one) are good in their roles. The controversial casting here is Malkovich, who’s far from being the image of the bulky and physically imposing character… but makes up for it in innocent menace. In many ways, Sinise’s Of Mice and Men is the ideal case for literary adaptation: It doesn’t deviate much from the original text, sumptuously executes the story, delivers on cinematic aspects—and in doing so, manages to reach even those who aren’t primed to like the story through the curricular circumstances of how they encountered it.