In 1940, John Ford made the definitive film about American life during the Great Depression, taking John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and adapting it into a poignant statement on a people attempting to rise to the challenges of economic collapse — and often falling short. What made that work so timeless wasn’t its attention to the larger economic and political issues at hand; it was the commitment to telling an effective small-scale story about this one family, keeping the big picture ever-present, but in the margins. The opposite side of the coin when trying to make a statement through your film is that the story takes a backseat to the sermon, and the movie becomes a series of bulleted talking points. For example: The Company Men.