A bit too easy going down

Rating: Null/10 (11 July 1999)

John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath." is generally considered one of the Great Ones. Ford's direction is assured, the Gregg Toland cinematography is stunning, and Henry Fonda is mesmerizing in what is probably his best performance. But the film just isn't all it's cracked up to be.
For one thing, characters disappear with no explanation or exhibit completely unmotivated changes of heart -- as if the director's cut had been hacked to pieces by the studio after the first preview in Pasadena. Worse, in spite of the unmitigated suffering, everything has a squeaky-clean gloss, and the Joads are suffused with an unrelenting nobility that makes you want to strangle them all. Certainly Steinbeck's "little people" were heavily romanticized, but you could still taste the Demon Dust that engulfed them. Here it too often feels like a little wayward talcum powder.
Fonda's Tom Joad is especially troubling, because he seems to exist as the mediating force between "our" prejudices about these people and their essential "goodness". He's clearly capable of violence -- and of realizing our worst fears about the poor and aimless -- but his faults are the result of an involuntary fall from grace. He's at the core an angel who's been cast from heaven by evil forces outside himself. This is rather simplistic.
Still, if the film ended on Fonda's famed visionary, fevered soliloquy, it would be easy to forgive much of the gloss. Instead the last big (and seemingly tacked-on) monologue is given to Ma Joad, and its perversely buoyant optimism is utterly true to the soporific populism of Old Hollywood.