Lennie is played by John Malkovich and George is Gary Sinise, who also directed this film, using an adaptation by Horton Foote. The most sincere compliment I can pay them is to say that all of them - writer and actors - have taken every unnecessary gesture, every possible gratuitous note, out of these characters. The story is as pure and lean as the original fable which formed in Steinbeck's mind. And because they don't try to do anything fancy -- don't try to make it anything other than exactly what it is -- they have a quiet triumph.
The time is the Great Depression. Men ride the rails, living in hobo camps, looking for a day's work. Two of them are George and Lennie, who together might make a perfect person, Lennie with his great strength and simplicity, George with his intelligence and cunning. George does the thinking for them, and Lennie does a lot of the work. In the harvest season, they find themselves working on a place with a lot of other guys, and a foreman named Curley, and Curley's wife (who is never named by Steinbeck, nor here, either).
Curley's wife is sexy, and she knows it. Played by Sherilyn Fenn, she enjoys her little starring role on the farm -- likes to know the eyes of the men follow her as she walks across the yard, just as in Paris a woman walks a little differently past a cafe. Curley (Casey Siemaszko), a sadistic brute, does not enjoy the show so much.
Lennie does not quite understand all of the implications of the situation, but he knows that he feels good when Curley's wife asks him to stroke her soft brown hair. George warns him to stay clear -- she's trouble. But Curley's wife makes that hard. She enjoys teasing the dim-witted giant, as if he were a dog tied up just out of reach. One day she handles him wrong, and although he is only trying to be nice to her, he gets confused and frightened and doesn't know his own strength. And then the men and the hounds are after him, and George won't be able to settle this one with his quick thinking.
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