If ever there were a time for a movie in which a mass workers’ movement battles the cruelty and stupidity of the 1 percent, surely it’s right now. It looks like that’s just what James Franco is offering with In Dubious Battle. The film, directed by Franco from Matthew Rager’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel (an Obama favorite), is about a strike among fruit pickers in the 1930s. Nat Wolff, from The Fault in Our Stars, has the lead role of a labor organizer while Franco plays his mentor. Other people on the right side of things include Selena Gomez, Vincent D’Onofrio, Sam Shepard, and Ed Harris. Meanwhile, Bryan Cranston plays the local muscle, while Robert Duvall is in full-on Noah Cross–in-Chinatown mode as the man who’d love to pay his workers a living wage, except for the fact that he doesn’t want to.
It’s been a long time since the last big star-studded drama about labor issues (North Country, maybe?), but then it’s also been a long time since mass protests had an effect on the presidency. From the trailer, In Dubious Battle looks like a throwback whose time has come. Along with the upcoming The Belko Experiment—in which office employees are made to murder each other for their bosses’ enjoyment—it looks like we may be headed for a rare period of honesty in cinema about relationships under capitalism. Somebody better make a Transformers movie before this comes out on Feb. 17, or we might have real trouble on our hands.
