Eeshani Kharshikar - Of Mice and Men Film Review

 

The film Of Mice and Men (1992), adapted from the eponymous novella by John Steinbeck, stars Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, Sherilyn Fenn, and other actors, and provides a great amount of information and details about the struggles of migrant workers during the Great Depression. While all the actors do a remarkable job of portraying characters from a novel written over 50 years prior, Gary Sinise, who plays George, does the best job at playing a conflicted character and elaborating on his character more than the novel does. Throughout the movie, especially in the added scenes, Sinise shows his skill at becoming George, personifying his actions perfectly. His best performance proves to be at the climax of the film, when he is faced with the decision to either kill Lennie, his only companion for basically his whole life, or let him go and face the other men in the search party. The audience can absolutely see the conflict play out in Sinise’s body language and face, something that is deeply missed in the novel. Through this expansion and detailedness of George’s character, the audience is able to understand the full weight of what George has to do, something that can come across as blunt in the book.

            As someone who has both watched the film and read the book, I would recommended the film only after reading the book. While the film is a good summary/wrap-up of the sequence of events in the book, the book provides more imagery and relates to the Great Depression more accurately than the film does. Additionally, the film proves to be a bit slow at times, attempting to fill the points that Steinbeck originally filled with eloquent imagery of landscape. Unfortunately, these gaps don’t translate to the screen as well as the filmmakers would have hoped, leading to someone who hadn’t read the book to feel that the story is slow and unnecessarily boring, thus taking away from the meaning of the story. The film alone will feel slow and disjointed, but the book alone misses the crucial point of the actor’s tonal and emotional portrayals of the characters.