OF MICE AND MEN
DIRECTOR: Anna D Shapiro
CAST: James Franco, Chris O’Dowd, Leighton Meister, Jim Norton, Ron Cephas Jones, Alex Morf, Joel Marsh Garland, James McMenamin, Jim Ortlieb and |Jim Parrack
CLASSIFICATION: TBA
RUNNING TIME: 140 minutes
RATING: ****
SAD AND harrowing, this stage adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novella is a nuanced portrait of a mean world of economic disempowerment.
Set in the dust bowl of the American Great Depression, it delves into how lost and nasty people become when they don’t have dreams to strive for, and how it can lift them up when they do find something to live for.
The story is a distillation of the loss of the American Dream while also pointing out a possible solution to people who feel they are nothing because they have nothing – that human connections mean more than whether you have the most material goods.
Intelligent, though uneducated George (Franco) and child-like Lennie (O’Dowd) of diminished mental capacity, travel to the umpteenth farm as barley shuckers, taking work wherever they can find it.
George berates Lenny for always getting into trouble, admonishing the big man that he could so easily have a much better life if he wasn’t saddled with looking after his friend. Yet, George softens his irate rant by telling Lenny a story about the good life the two will one day have, and how they are the luckiest people around because they look out for each other.
Lenny is George’s heart outside his body; Lenny dreams what George cannot dream for himself and this is ultimately a beautiful love story between two people who are better for knowing each other.
It is also an intricate portrait of human relationships at the time of the Great Depression in the US.
We see the hierarchy of race, gender and class among the various characters and delve into themes of loneliness, oppression and abuse of power.
There is the Boss (Norton) and his son Curly (Morf) with his little-man syndrome and Curly’s wife (Meister), always simply referred to as Curley’s wife. She has no identity of her own and is simply a mistrusted symbol who represents danger to the men, especially Lenny.
Crooks (Jones) is the stablehand, exiled from the bunkhouse and socialising with the men because he is black; Candy (Ortlieb) is the ageing ranch-hand who worries that having only one hand is going to make him lose his job soon; while Slim (Parrack), the mule-handler, is respected by the men and the only one who gains a measure of understanding of the relationship between Lenny and George.
O’Dowd is more nuanced than Franco in his approach to his character. Thanks to the camera-work we get close-ups that the audience would not, so we see the minute facial nuances as George’s emotions change, though his voice pitch stays the same. O’Dowd, though, does better to create the intellectually challenged, innocent-minded Lenny with his slow, simple speech patterns and hesitant, repetitive hand motions.
While it takes Franco a while to settle into the performance, O’Dowd easily finds the rhythm and the eventual chemistry between the two is believable and real.
The evocative sets give us golden sunsets and a towering steel bunkhouse of great detail and even a tiny river on stage.
• Filmed at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, this limited screening is part of the NT Live screenings at Ster-Kinekor Nouveau tomorrow and Dec 16 at 5pm; Sunday at 2.30pm; Tuesday and Dec 17 at 11.30am and Dec 18 at 5.30pm.