‘Of Mice and Men’ (PG-13)

When a drama pits man against man against the sweeping vistas of nature, it's automatically compelling. When it works, it's an all-encompassing triumph. It calls to -- and satisfies -- the deepest, most primitive impulses.

Certainly producer/director Gary Sinise's "Of Mice and Men," set in picturesque California wheatfields, has the in-built advantage of John Steinbeck's great novel to work from. But weighty tomes often pose greater adaptative problems than they're worth. What's great about "Of Mice and Men"-the-movie is how a dusty 1937 novel is given life, as if this Depression-era story of migrant workers were written just yesterday for the screen. That's what classics were made for -- to be passed on.

The great pleasure of this movie is in what performers Sinise and John Malkovich, Ray Walton and others do with it; what director Sinise does with it; and, perhaps most important, what screenwriter Horton Foote does with it.

Set in the 1930s, the movie introduces Sinise and his retarded lifelong companion, Malkovich, as they run from another spate of trouble. A crying woman is running away, her dress torn. The two friends, their meager bundles in hand, are running in the other direction for their lives, with angry men on horseback and baying hounds in pursuit. They may evade the posse this time but not the trouble. As they'll come to find, they carry it with them.

After a wearying bus trip and 10-mile trudge to Soledad, Calif., the unemployed workers arrive at the Tyler Ranch, run by bull-necked Noble Willingham and his combative son Casey Siesmaszko. Sinise, who speaks for his big, silent partner, as he has so many times before, parlays jobs for both of them.

It's clear, however, that trouble will return. Gentle but powerful Malkovich is on a collision course with Siesmaszko -- a petty tyrant who doesn't like big men or anyone talking to wife Sherilyn Fenn. As for lonely Fenn, she's spoiling for trouble herself.

There's little point describing what happens; it's as fine a story as it is simple. What matters is how it happens. Malkovich and Sinise, who worked together in Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre (which Sinise co-founded), are touching and pleasurable together. Malkovich's portrayal of big, simple naif Lennie will attract the most attention, yet he is remarkably restrained, skirting the dangerous fence between verisimilitude and sheer ham. But Sinise, in the quieter, caretaking role, achieves at least as much.

Writer Foote, who also adapted for the screen "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Tender Mercies" and "The Trip to Bountiful," writes the good, old-fashioned way. People express their troubles clearly, holding on to thin dreams as they go about their thankless business.

In the best scene of the movie, a ranch worker demands that old-timer Ray Walston kill his smelly, aging dog. Walston argues weakly for the life of his pet but the worker is adamant. He pulls out a gun and against the old man's wishes leads the animal out. The next few moments, as Walston and the other workers wait for the inevitable sound, are excruciating. Tragic occurrences like this fill "Of Mice and Men." Despite a span of six decades, these hardscrabble, solitary lives still retain the same meanings, the same emotional truths.