Review of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) by Adam R — 22 Nov 2016

Despite being considered a masterpiece, Grapes of Wrath is arguably one of the worst films I have ever seen. Although the film itself is in black and white, the screenplay was written entirely in purple (as in purple prose) and and feels like the writers were trying to fill a minimum word requirement for an essay than create a realistic dialogue .

The majority of the characters speaks almost entirely in deep, meaningful, almost shakespearean monologues that convey the same general messages over and over and over again, and destroy any sense of genuineness.

Despite being poor/lower middle class farmers from Oklahoma, they all speak as if they are high school english teachers attempting to convey their superior vocabulary to a room full of students. And every speech is almost the exact same thing every time too, regardless of who is saying it.

You could swap out one character's lines of dialogue in this films for another's, and not notice the difference. The only scrapes of character development in the film only serve to highlight the fact that these really aren't characters at all, merely shells created to stuff more dialogue and symbolism into, making them more fountains of pretentious rambling than anything else.

The only two characters who at all speak differently from the rest, have different mannerisms or have different opinions or ways of solving problems, are killed, one of them being the father, who is at nearly the very start of the families journey.

In the end, the film becomes more boring and eye-rolling pretentious than it does involving or heart wrenching because none of the main characters feel real enough to care about, and the story itself serves more to highlight its author's self-perceived flawless sense of morality than to highlight the struggles of real people.