Cinema
Of Mice and Men (PG', selected cinemas)
The Waterdance (15', selected cinemas)
Softening the blow
Vanessa Letts
In Bertolucci's version of The Sheltering Sky he took Paul Bowles's mediocre prose descriptions of the desert and converted them into wonderful film footage. John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men has almost no lyrical sentences in it at all. Only once does he aim to be beautiful, when he is capturing the atmosphere inside a dark- ened bunkhouse: 'The sun square was on the floor now, and the flies whipped through it like sparks.' Unlike Bowles, Steinbeck suggests motion almost entirely through dialogue. This is something you would never guess from the new film ver- sion, which could perfectly well be snipped
into half-minute pieces and sold off to make 222 Marlboro cigarette commercials. The predominant look — dusty tracks, sun- burnt fields and swirling hayseeds — has been deliberately chosen to contrast with the bleak and lonely existence of the ranch hands who work the land, but the formula doesn't work. For the audience it is impos- sible not to enjoy being drenched in visual warmth: the pictures soften the blow of the story rather than emphasise it.
The adaptation itself, by Horton Foote (who won an Oscar for his screenplay for To Kill a Mocking Bird), is taken pretty faithfully from the novel. George (Gary Sinise) and Lennie (John Malkovich) arrive at the Tyler Ranch having fled a lynch party in a place called Weed. Ranch hands are usually 'the loneliest guys in the world', but these two travel together and look out for each other. George is sharp and per- sonable. Lennie is a child with the strength of a giant. They dream of owning a house and ten acres, but their dream is doomed.
Foote's only serious bit of plot interfer- ence lies in watering down the racism directed against Crooks, a black stable buck segregated from the other workers. There's no good reason for this change. The film-makers go to immense effort to recreate period detail and yet in this respect they shy away from it. There is a similar bit of fudging in the recent film of The Last of the Mohicans, where Michael Mann leaves out the West Indian ancestry of one of the heroines. It is as if film- makers these days daren't risk tackling the loaded issue of racism, even with a buffer of historical context around it.
Of Mice and Men stars its director and co-producer, Gary Sinise. As well as glam- orising California he glamorises himself. He is an exceptionally beautiful man. The film more than the book makes his charac- ter's tragedy central. Even so, Sinise doesn't quite manage to overcome the powerful impression made by John Malkovich, whose portrayal of a simpleton is disconcertingly inconsistent, from one mannered outburst to the next. The film might have been able to support one slight- ly implausible performance, but it drifts under the weight of two.
Having said this, Of Mice and Men has the dignity of good intentions. The sup- porting cast (including Sherilyn Fenn and Ray Walston) is strong. The story has a naïvely high quota of tragic inevitability, but it is still moving. Unless you hate Stein- beck, this new adaptation is worth a look.
Some time after his cult success with the script for River's Edge, Neal Jiminez had a hiking accident and broke his neck. The Waterdance is his confident directorial debut. His film follows the trials and tribu- lations of three paraplegics in a rehab ward adapting to life from the waist upwards. One is a sensitive, articulate writer (Eric Stoltz), the second a wildly prejudiced Hell's Angel biker (William Forsythe) and the third a small-time criminal who had been thrown into a dry river by some rivals (Wesley Snipes). The three men, not so surprisingly, get drawn into each other's miseries.
'Tot' in women's magazine terminology refers to 'triumph over tragedy'. This genre can be depressingly sentimental. Luckily the screenplay for The Waterdance is suffi- ciently intelligent and revealing to avoid most of the pitfalls. There are some whim- sical elements to it, but the physical details are convincing enough to anchor our emo- tions. It is also a funny film and has good central performances.
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