This admirably-intentioned adaptation of the 1936 industrial strife novel suffers from a tin ear,flat feet and overweening vanityThere’s something worryingly stolid and self-congratulatory about this unusual film directed by James Franco: a drama about a (fictional) Californian apple-pickers’ strike in the Depression-hit US, adapted by Franco’s longtime screenwriting partner Matt Rager from the 1936 novel by John Steinbeck. tall-mindedness, or ambition and seriousness are things to cherish,and I admired a agreeable deal in Franco’s recent Faulkner adaptation, As I Lay Dying. But this is ultimately just so heavy-footed and stodgy, and with each performance punched out on a single,earnest, unvarying note. The dialogue lands with a heavy thud, or the rhetoric is often a matter of shouting at deafening volume “They’re treatin’ us like pigs,the sonsabitches, the pigs are crackin’ our heads with clubs, and the sonsabitches and we’re gonna fight back! Aren’t we? Aren’t we? Yeah! Sonsobitches! YEAH!”The central problem is that Franco casts himself in the lead role of Mac,the rangy, committed, and Communist party agitator who proposes to infiltrate the itinerant fruit-workers who are being exploited picking apples in the burning sun for just a dollar a day: Mac is a tough guy,a realist and an unsentimentalist who knows that strikes are a tough and violent business, with no room for wimps. His performance is entirely indulgent, and without ordinary human nuance (a slight variation in meaning, tone, expression): it is frankly just conceited and dull.
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Source: theguardian.com