Gator Chow

"All the King's Men": Politics as fatty, indigestible gumbo.  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Penn is interesting to watch...

The Downside: ...for about thirty minutes.

    You know All the King's Men is in trouble before reading the stories about how writer/director Steven Zaillian never watched the Oscar-winning 1949 adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's fictionalized novel.  In fact, you could tell this movie was in trouble a year ago, when it was slated to be an awards season contender against the likes of Crash and Brokeback Mountain, then suddenly dropped off the radar.  Movies switching release dates isn't a new, or necessarily bad, phenomenon.  But by a whole year?  To an Oscar hopeful?  Never.

    Sadly, you can watch All the King's Men and see what all the lack of faith was about.  What Zaillian's created here is a tangle of good and confused intentions, rotting away on the branch among the fruits of one of the most misused pedigree casts since Bonfire of the Vanities.  Warren's story, loosely based on the rise and bullet-riddled fall of real-life Louisiana governor Huey Long, is considered by many one of the great political entries in American literature.  Despite its post-Depression era, south of the Mason-Dixon line setting, its theme of good old fashioned everyman values falling prey to greed and political necessity is universal, and it would have been interesting to see how the story could be twisted for today, when all the roads and bridges are built, but the gap between haves and have-nots is larger than ever.

    This is an ambition way above the competencies of Zaillian's modern remake.  I didn't have time to be troubled by whether or not it was engaging in the loftier premises of articulating modern political concerns in a retro-time warp; All the King's Men is so bumblefooted, so second guessing-prone that it can't even articulate the most basic challenges of who its story is about and what reason, if any, we should have for giving a damn.

    Warren's Long doppelganger is Willie Stark, pictured in the film as a trusting, almost to the point of pulling the wool down himself, backwoods bayou progressive whose warnings about cost-skimming on a local school project come to haunting life after an accident claims the life of three children.  A rotund political shark (Sopranos' James Gandolfini) convinces Stark to run for the highest off in the state on the sympathetic David-vs-Goliath streak his crusading has lent him, only to discover he's little more than a plot to split the so-called "hick vote" and let a spit-polished city-slicker slide into the Governor's mansion.  Stark decides to go completely Paddy Chayefsky on everyone's asses, taking the stage at a state fair and turning it into a damn-the-bourgeoisie fire and brimstone pulpit.

    These are the small moments in which All the King's Men at least emulates a rousing success, with Sean Penn going flat out in Willie Stark's crusade to bring the swamp-and-pitchfork fight of the "little people" right to the steps of the capital.  The obligatory montage of speeches in which Stark spits out his rallying cry to "Nail 'em up" is pulse-quickening, and almost Looney-Toons frightening, in the way any good egalitarian tirade should be.  Penn, no doubt, will be splitting away with much of the attention from this film, and not surprisingly because in the first third he manages to make Willie Stark the kind of God-fearing, orange-soda-pop-drinking libertarian underdog superhero Warren intended.

    It doesn't last, though.  As quickly as Stark rants his way into power, he goes from being earnest populist to sneering crook so fast you can almost hear the movie jumping the tracks.  Of course, this was what was intended- Warren's Stark was intended as the personification of the old saying that "absolute power corrupts absolutely," yet the transformation Zaillian drapes his Stark in is less of a man compromised by need and temptation than of convenience- it's such a hairpin turn that the Willie Stark Penn plays in the first part of the film isn't even a distant relative of the one he plays at the end, who is less a picture of a good man gone bad than a rote bucolic villain, not a stone's throw away from one of the rednecks in Deliverance dressed up in a nice suit.  As this scrutiny of the fabric of moral character fails, so does our interest in Penn, and in the movie.  By the time Zaillian wraps up this clunky fable, we're lost for the point.  Is it a lament of lost realpolitik innocence or simply Macbeth getting what's his at the end?  Since Zaillian is confused on who his Willie Stark really is, we're even more so.  This doesn't stop Zaillian from laying on the oppressive symbolism, oh no.  Drinking game time- a shot for every late-night speech on the steps of capital, with Stark's larger-than-life silhouette towering behind him, or a double-shot for every time Stark's car passes a trio of roadside crosses.

    Instead, All the King's Men pussyfoots and bogs down in an under-ripe plot about a Stark protégé (Jude Law) who starts as wide-eyed idealist and begins to see his boss as the devil incarnate after he's tasked with digging up some dirt on a conservative power-broker judge (Anthony Hopkins) with nary a hint of family conflict.  It isn't surprising that Stark seems so transparent here- as the movie ferments on the tribulations of Law's Jack Burden and his tedious pining for the ex-governor's daughter (Kate Winslet, seeming the most out-of-place of all), he gets delegated to the backdrop.  This log-rolling through some of the most uninteresting skeletons in the closet imaginable is deadly to the pace of the film and only makes the moral tale more anemic.  Zaillian doesn't have his eye on the ball here- how he could have wasted so much celluloid on so little, while ignoring Stark's metaphorical bite from the apple is criminal.  Even the one character who, in tandem, represents Stark's goodness and corruption, his wife who doesn't favor liquor or philandering and is the most betrayed when he becomes an adulterous boozer, is practically absent from the movie. 

    Those who are in the movie don't, or probably can't, do much to fill in the gap.  Law at least holds his own- more so than the last time he had to play a slow-drawled southerner in the botched Cold Mountain.  Winslet, though, isn't able to coax up even a hint of mystery or sensuality, nor is Patricia Clarkson (Good Night and Good Luck), Stark's political maker who's also deceived when Stark starts playing a sexual roulette wheel.  Anthony Hopkins, who once played Nixon, at least lends us fond memories of another, better movie about a normal man's fall from grace at the hands of ambition and pragmatism.  Virginia Beach native Mark Ruffalo simply sleepwalks through the role of Winslet's conscience-conflicted brother.

    Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's masterful Schindler's List, made an awesome movie about a young chess prodigy in 1993's Searching for Bobby Fisher, however his adaptation of the small-town-vs-big-company book A Civil Action was a disappointment and this is even a bigger one.  There is ambition here, and you can't fault Zaillian for that, but his take on Warren's tale is too muddled and lifeless to carry such a burden.  We should know who Willie Stark is- God knows Americans of every stripe have had to deal with the likes of him from time to time, but at the end of Zaillian's polemic he's still just a tool, a symbol; as empty and shapeless as the bubbles in his orange soda pop.  C

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