In Dubious Battle — directed by James Franco. 1930s Docudrama. 1 hour 50 minutes Color 2016.
★★★★★
The Story: Two fair-wage operatives infiltrate orchard-pickers to strike for fair-wages and stick around to wage a war.
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John Steinbeck’s novel upon which this film is based is a polemic, with the forced idealism of the period making it difficult to stomach.
The film, however, registers not as a polemic but as spectacle in the sense that the old sand-and-sandals Roman epics used to be. And this is all to the good.
The period is interesting because it revels in the very reverse of the ‘30s glamor for which the Hollywood films of the period were also famous. (Of course, the period also gave us The Warner Bros. side of things, with the dead-end Depression.) Better than the films of that era, this film shows the fix the itinerant pickers are in — and it does it also better than the book. It is there right before us in dramas of shotgun, starvation, and strike.
The present film also crams with the rich character actors such as the ‘30s films used to boast — now in the modern talents of Bryan Cranston, Robert Duval, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris, and Sam Shepard — and each of them is in top form, perfectly cast, and necessary — and each a senior actor. To see them in action is to feel proud of each and every one.
The two infiltrators are played by James Franco, the mentor of the younger, played by Natt Wolff. The forces they set in motion eddy back and forth and roundabout and are not all black and white. So the story, which is told from the point of view of the workers, is not so simple or so sweet.
A huge cast embellishes the film and is never wrong — a hard thing for a director to achieve. No hollow hurrahs echo. Each big turn of events feels grim and authentic. The direction, by which I mean the story-telling, seems rich, simple, and true.
Thousands of strikes took place in those years before the Wagner act that legitimized Unions and ended wage cheating. Millions were out of work before WWII put everyone to work together.
We in the audience are a cast of hundreds, as are those on the screen. We are all in this story. We are all included. So every American child would benefit to see the film. It shows how we once all almost drowned in a lake of imbalance: The Great Depression. A new one is rising: climate-change. Will we rise to the occasion again? Will we fight?