depression – Chris Barsanti

Dust Bowl farm, June 1938, by Dorothea Lange (Library of Congress)

Seventy-five years ago this month, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. The anniversary is as good an excuse as any to go back and crack open this gorgeous, painful, Biblical epic.

I wrote about The Grapes of Wrath and its continuing power and relevance for the The Barnes & Noble Review:

Freedom in America has always been entwined with freedom of movement. The freedom to immigrate, the freedom to relocate from one state to the next, the freedom to wander without being hassled. That’s one of the reasons John Steinbeck’s coruscating epic of exodus, The Grapes of Wrath, hit bestseller lists like a bomb when it was published in 1939. It wasn’t a novel about people taking wing and transforming themselves in new settings. Steinbeck showed Americans heading west to better themselves like waves of people before them, only to be blocked, harried, fenced in, run off, denied.

Seventy-five years later, the novel still speaks to us for this same reason…

In theory, this week’s pharma-thriller Side Effects is supposed to be Steven Soderbergh’s last feature film as director. He’s something of a workaholic, film-wise, so we’ll see if he sticks to that. But in any case, the film itself is an interesting swan song, not exactly career-defining but a neat piece of work regardless:

My full review is at Film Journal International:

The film’s ad campaign hinted at something vaguely related to Contagion, playing up the fact that both movies share a director (Soderbergh) and screenwriter (Scott Z. Burns), and that they are structured around a specific modern-day fear. While that pandemic film was more a fully realized, flesh-and-blood fictional story than it was a docudrama, Side Effects is really a sleekly constructed noir where the pharmaceutical topicality is mostly backdrop…

You can see the trailer here:

Chris Barsanti

Tag: depression

In Books: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ 75th Anniversary

New in Theaters: ‘Side Effects’