POSITIVE REVIEWS
Note: Franco received the Mimmo Rotella Foundation Award in Venice 2016 for In Dubious Battle, as well as Career Award at Deauville 2016 in France.
1.
http://www.cinematographe.it/99583/recensioni/in-dubious-battle-recensione-film-james-franco.html Translation used.
In Dubious Battle, the films presented at the 73. Exhibition of Cinematographic Art in Venice and directed by James Franco , is adapted from the novel by John Steinbeck. The adaptation was edited by Matt Rager and is played by Nat Wolff, James Franco, Vincent D'Onofrio, Selena Gomez, Ed Harris and Robert Duvall.
Highly anticipated by critics and audiences, the new James Franco movie depicts masterfully the condition of American workers in the '20s, underpaid and trampled on by their leaders, by law, by the courts, in short, their fate is to suffer from all the great depression the daily live on their skin.
Mac (Franco) is a political activist of the radical left of the Industrial Workers of the World, who together with Edie, energetic and resolute militant, Joy (overtime Ed Harris), and Jim, the first experience of social struggle, trying to fit in among the workers during the fruit picked in the California valleys, trying to convince them to organize themselves and go on strike for better pay, a decent dwelling and the humane and safe working conditions.
Jim is a young man who is attracted by the thirst for justice and feel with all his being to have to do something, the situation of workers is unsustainable: they are forced to migrate, without means and ways to do this, groped to work in conditions less extreme, treated like dogs, rather like pigs, because they can not arise, to rebel, (the strike is an act seditious and banned) almost kept hostage by bands of armed guards and their leaders, who with eternal rule or works or die abuse their lack of alternatives to segregate them into slavery at very low wages.
Window to the past that shows us the current forms of slavery? Why not, but who knows if some CEO was present in the room and you feel called upon. But the story goes and tells more.
Eager to educate the people to fight for their rights, Macs Joy and leave for a work camp where the apples are harvested; accept the job to mingle with the workers, they look around talking about how as with people but notice right away that their temperament is unfortunately not proactive, rather, the workers fear dialogue, they not like to talk about policy and the fight class because they know they can suffer horrible consequences if only heard.
The law is not from them, so even if you were never beaten or worse killed by guards no one would help them, their condition of loneliness and estrangement from the working society is such as to induce them to silence and denial.
But a person is different from the others: during a break make the acquaintance of London, family man and in some way the moral leader of the group pickers. London is very concerned, your daughter is going to have a baby, people like him has no future, no home nor possessions, only the little strip of land that the vassal turn allows him to be able to live, they are desperate, poor and unable to subvert their condition.
With a slow but precise operation of conviction, Mac and Joy ingraziano the confidence of London and together they realize that the only resource to be able to live it all in the resistance, in rebellion, there is no other opportunity to be able to hope for a ( r) better existence but to fight for themselves, for the people, for an idea of better world, more just, perhaps with the auspicious to dictate a line that would awaken the nation from its inertia symptomatic .
Fatigue, loss and abuse of a helpless people
But the story takes its course, makes you cringe because it is the past, where we came from, and there has inexorably to fatigue, the decadence, the abuses of an unarmed people, to rich disseminators of hatred and fear. The cards are shuffled several times, the enemy is first parallel harassed, then confused, then feared until the epilogue, overlooked and stunning.
"It is always very hard not to have a" side effect "political and politicizing a transposition of a story by Steinbeck, but this time I think that my goal was another. I made the film trying to recreate the experience that you have read the book by Steinbeck, creating an epic story that was a parallel with the situation that some workers live today. There should be more stories like these. "
In Dubious Battle is a work cynical and engaging
James Franco not gilds the pill of the fight, in fact his story is extraordinary because cynical and engaging at the right point, the speeches he makes to the workers are strong, persuasive, standing ovation (Mac seems that filled the gap between America and Cuba). Anyone would get up from his chair to follow them in their battles, the feeling that invades you is visceral, it's something that you already own, you've already inside, holding you, and when the workers suffer the worst floggings hatred destroys you, the pain oppresses you, you feel blinded, tired, weep for them, breaths when they breathe, they struggle when they shook, die when they die.
Blood flows, stops, freezes, this film will chews and spits you, embraces you and deliver you, is what we were all waiting by James Franco and Venice.
The class struggle narrated as God intended and written by a monument of world literature, a way of telling the inner life of the farmers, so the plural, universal, collective, that justice comes from the lowest injustice that unions exist for a thousand reasons and that the strike is an inalienable right. Thanks to James Franco for reminding us that what appears today as it was not apparent before considerable minimally as an inalienable right.
4 Out 5 stars
TOTAL SCORE
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http://www.shockya.com/news/2016/09/03/in-dubious-battle-movie-review-venice-film-festival-2016/
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http://www.tiff.net/films/in-dubious-battle/index.html