MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Mice and Men,’ ‘92 Edition, Squeaks By

John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel “Of Mice and Men” has been dramatized on stage and in the movies and on television. It’s entered our cultural bloodstream, and yet, no matter how familiar the material has become, it still remains affecting. It may be one of those warhorses, like “The Glass Menagerie,” that still has the power to move audiences long after the first blush of remembrance.

Still, is there enough reason for Gary Sinise to have remade “Of Mice and Men”? You can respond to Steinbeck’s qualities of feeling in the movie, but Sinise, who directed as well as stars as the itinerant ranch hand George opposite John Malkovich’s hulking, feeble-minded Lennie, doesn’t really make the material his own. It’s a “distinguished” piece of filmmaking in that somewhat lifeless, classical tradition where all the actors seem a bit too posed to be believable and all the colors seem too bright and varnished. (Rated PG-13 for some scenes of violence, it opens today at selected theaters.)

Steinbeck built classical themes into his novel but he understated and humanized them. The load of symbolism in the book doesn’t weigh down the narrative; instead, it acts as an anchor. Even if you’re encountering the material for the first time, it has a fatedness, a bittersweet inevitability, and some of this comes through in the movie. (Quite a bit more came through in Lewis Milestone’s great 1939 film version, featuring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. as George and Lennie, as well as one of Aaron Copland’s most beautiful scores.)

George and Lennie, broke and hungry, find work on a ranch that is like a microcosm of Dust Bowl humanity. The ranch boss’ son Curley (Casey Siemaszko) is a brutal pipsqueak with an errant, unhappy wife (Sherilyn Fenn). An old man, Candy (Ray Walston), hankers for the same dream as Lennie and George: a small cottage he can call his own. Crooks (Joe Morton) is the ostracized black ranch hand who keeps to his embittered self.

Sinise and his screenwriter, Horton Foote, can’t be accused of milking any parallels between the Depression miseries on the screen and our own recession-era situation. Instead the parallels creep up on you; we recognize how George and Lennie are soulmates to today’s homeless. This is probably a wise choice: Steinbeck, after all, didn’t draw any political conclusions in his novel. He opted for “timelessness” and, lo and behold, he actually achieved it. Yet Sinise’s version cries out for some new approach.

Sinise and Foote attempt to humanize Fenn’s role a bit--in the original book she’s just referred to as “Curley’s wife”--but she still doesn’t add up to much more than a lackadaisical temptress. The whole production rests on the performances of Sinise and Malkovich, who first played Lennie and George in a 1980 Steppenwolf Theater Company production in Chicago. Their interplay has a worked-out ease but not much resonance. Sinise is too reined-in; we don’t see his own emotional reasons for protecting Lennie, and we don’t really register his brief joys when he soliloquizes to Lennie about the promised land.

Malkovich’s halting, singsong accent takes some getting used to: At times he sounds like Jerry Lewis trying to sound Yiddish. He’s touching all right--and woe to the actor playing Lennie who isn’t. But the performance, perhaps unavoidably, is a species of stunt. He’s the only showoff in a movie that could use some more showing off.

‘Of Mice and Men’

John Malkovich: Lennie

Gary Sinise: George

Ray Walston: Candy

John Terry: Slim

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presentation of a Russ Smith/Gary Sinise production. Director Gary Sinise. Producers Sinise, Russ Smith. Executive producer Alan C. Blomquist. Screenplay by Horton Foote. Cinematographer Kenneth MacMillan. Editor Robert L. Sinise. Costumes Shay Cunliffe. Music Mark Isham. Production design David Gropman. Art director Dan Davis. Set designer Cheryl T. Smith. Set decorators Karen Schulz and Joyce Anne Gilstrap. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (violence).