Gary Sinise’s 1992 remake of the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men was long and boring, but strangely compeling. Sinise plays George, a migrant worker in Californa during the Great Depression. George is joined at the hip to a giant named Lennie Smalls, played by John Malkovich.
As the movie opens, we see Lennie and George fleeing from a posse, George has done some very bad thing, and they had to get away, hiding among the reeds in a creek to throw off the bloodhounds. From there, the story revolves around them as they seek work at a Barley farm, doing hard manual labor as they desperately try to stay out of trouble.
Like many Steinbeck pieces, and like the Robert Burns poem “To A Mouse” on which the story is based, at its center this is a universal story told through simple (almost parable-like themes). For instance, an old man has a very old dog that that the bunkhouse agrees should be put out of its misery. The dog suffers through each day, but its the old man’s only friend in the world, loving him unconditionally. Eventually, another ranch hand takes the dog out and shoots it.
The simple theme here is one of burden and responsibility, posing the question: How much burden is too much, and when does our responsibility move from the ones we love to the greater good of community?
It’s a tragic, sad story, but one worth watching. The performances by Sinise and Malkovich are wonderful, and the supporting cast draws our interest. It’s a dirty, sweaty story, told in the same meandering way as Paul Neuman’s Cool Hand Luke: When we reach the climactic tragedies, they seem unavoidable.
That inevitability is tough to swallow, but so is life, sometimes.