The Grapes of Wrath. The. Grapes. Of. Wrath. The Grrrapes of Wrrrath. It sounds almost biblical, with those successive r’s that you can roll in the back of your throat like Martin Luther King. The GrrrAAApes of WrrrrAAAth.

The title originally belonged to a book by John Steinbeck, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the book and a Nobel Prize for his entire oeuvre. It was made into a film by John Ford, one of the most respected filmmaker of his day, who hired   Henry Fonda to play the lead role. They definitely didn’t cut any corners in the making of this movie, and many people regard it to be one of the quintessential American films of the 20th century. I am not one of those people.

The Grapes of Wrath starts in a very iconic way: we see a country road at dawn, completely deserted save for one man. He is walking towards us. We don’t know who that man is, or why he is walking there, but we are instantly intrigued. The man could walk all the way to the camera, and we would still be intrigued, like the opening of Paris, Texas. But instead of having him walk all the way, the movie almost immediately cuts to a shot of the man walking much closer to the camera. It’s a small moment, but very exemplary for the rest of the movie: it never allows us to look at the nice photography, but always focuses on the people.

The walking man is Tom Joad, who has done his time for homicide and now returns to the house of his family. He finds it deserted. When he was sent to jail, it was the roaring twenties. Now it’s the Great Depression. He learns that his family has befallen a very common fate: they have been evicted from the land they have lived on for many generations by a large company. It’s a sad fate, and all the more so because it really happened to many real families in the 1930′s. And like many other families, the Joads decide to set out for California, where it’s rumored there is work for unskilled laborers.

Their journey is difficult, and when they finally arrive there’s no work to be found anywhere. They settle down in a camp with many other families, all equally starving. One day, a landowner in a massive car arrives and asks around for laborers. One man in the crowd tries to get a contract before he gets to work, and rallies his brethren to do the same. The landowner’s bodyguard gets out of the car and publicly beats him. No one dares to intervene.

The problem with this sequence is that it’s so obviously making a point that it stops being affecting in any way. The landowner is one twirling mustache away from being Dirk Dastardly, while the union member why dares to step up for his rights is so bizarrely virtuous that I’m a little surprised they didn’t just give him a halo in advance. And the whole movie is like that: all the poor people are loving, brave and resilient, while everyone who has any money instantly turns into some kind of monster. The problem is not that the movie makes a clear divide between good and evil characters.

A lot of movies have faceless bad guys because it’s narratively convenient but The Grapes of Wrath addresses a very real situation, that affected a lot of very real people. And yet, none of the characters in the movie feel like real people. They feel like statements. The children characters are the worst: they never bicker, complain, talk back to their parents or do anything besides being adorable little angels. Even when they are starving, none of them even seems to consider stealing some food. I genuinely wonder whether the people who made this movie ever met any real children.

All this feeds back into itself: because the characters feel like they exist solely for the purpose of making a point, it’s hard to become genuinely interested in their pain, and because we don’t get emotionally involved with the characters, it’s hard to care about the point that the movie tries to make. The movie is so transparent that by the end I was hardly paying attention because I already knew what was going to happen anyway. And it’s not even that I disagree with the point being made. Quite the opposite, in fact. But just because a movie agrees with me doesn’t mean it does so convincingly.

The Grapes of Wrath is a movie that tries so hard to tell me something that it becomes annoying, like a salesman putting his foot between the door. If you want to watch a good movie about poverty, go watch Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. That movie focusses on one man, not a great man but not a bad man either, who fights the complex world around him. Because he is such a human character we feel his pain, something that is sorely lacking in The Grapes of Wrath. Oh, and that beautiful title I talked about earlier? It’s never explained. There is not even the tiniest reference to it. So much for that.

C+

(6/10)

Max