Word: joads
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...Ghost of Tom Joad, is his best in years, it's because Springsteen has turned his attention once again to the downtrodden. The songs on the new album are about desperate lives along the Mexican-American border. Each is like a short story; several unwind without choruses. On Sinaloa Cowboys, Springsteen sings of two illegal immigrants who fall in with drug traffickers (he manages to rhyme "ravine" and "methamphetamine"). His sound--somewhere between Springsteen's stark Nebraska album and his serenely wrenching hit Streets of Philadelphia--is spare, featuring little instrumentation beyond an acoustic guitar, harmonica and keyboard...
...work has focused not on the people who sign the paychecks but on the guys and gals who have to make them stretch for a whole week. If in recent years Springsteen had lost touch with his proletarian passions, he's rediscovered them with "The Ghost of Tom Joad," a new collection of songs about desperate lives along the Mexican border. "This album has the power to haunt," says TIME's Christopher John Farley. "Springsteen's sound, which is somewhere between his stark 'Nebraska' album and his serenely wrenching hit 'Streets of Philadelphia, is spare, featuring little instrumentation beyond...
...clearest instances of this newfound grit are the two most famous speeches. When Lois Smith, giving the finest performance of a great stage career, says as Ma Joad that she knows "the people" will endure, she offers none of the reassuring faith of Jane Darwell in the film. Her words are instead the hollow attempt of a frightened peasant to calm herself and to reassure a son she expects never to see again. When Gary Sinise as Tom Joad tells her that wherever people are organizing for freedom and a better day, he will be there, he does not ooze...
...GRAPES OF WRATH Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe adapted Steinbeck's novel of the Dust Bowl into an absorbing three-hour docudrama marked by ruthless unsentimentality about the Joad clan, clinging haplessly and disastrously to folk wisdom and totemic faith in the family...
...Shepard is once again the icon of incorruptibility who refuses to claim the center of a film. Toward the end of Country Shepard's character disappears, with little explanation, in what may be a gentlemanly bow to Jessica Lange, a flinty, landsomely wasted matriarch. Mother ones, meet Ma Joad. -By Richard Corliss...