ALL THE KING'S MEN (Dir. Steven Zallian. 2006. PG-13. 128 mins. Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Anthony Hopkins.
The book you didn't want to read in high school becomes the movie you won't want to see this fall.
Despite certain relevance (an anti-hero populist politician brought down by big money career pols), evocative location shooting, and an all-star cast rounded up from the far corners of the Academy Award winning world, All The King's Men plays like a high-minded theme paper written as a chore. Yet the film, directed and adapted by Zallian from Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a Huey Long-like governor, isn't nearly the wreck that its bombastic trailers—now playing for an ominous twelve months—would have it seem.
n the Oscar-winning 1954 original film version, Broderick Crawford played the antihero Willie Stark, the Huey Long-like "hick" outsider who wins the governor's seat on a "stick it to the rich/build hospitals and schools for the poor" platform. Poor folk adore him, the rich—and Standard Oil—want him out. This time around, Stark is a younger, less rotund, more menacing Sean Penn. (I'm sure Penn's performance will get a lot of flack, but he was more sly and funny than I expected, and really effective in one scene, when Stark tosses aside his prepared speech and romances a fairground crowd like a snake oil salesman on the con. But after that, whenever Penn's Stark appears in public, he's atop a staircase, hollering at at the faceless masses who seem to be about a quarter mile away.
Narrating Stark's rise to power—and then corruption—is newspaperman Jack Burden (Jude Law, looking and sounding so much like Laurence Harvey in WALK ON THE WILD SIDE that it's just uncanny). Burden quits his writing job to work to Stark, the pol says, "not for love, nor money, nor principle." So why does he do it? Because someone's got to tell the story, I guess. Someone's got to be there for the flashback to childhood traumas. Jack grew up rich, in one of those Spanish Moss-draped plantation homes that all wealthy Southerners own, in novels and movies. Mama (Kathy Baker) is sozzled ex-debutante, godpapa (Anthony Hopkins) is an esteemed state judge who hates and fears Willie Stark, and rich kids next door Anne and Adam Peyton (Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo) loom large in Jack's voice-over memories. Once you hear Jude Law say, in his faux-N'Orleans accent, that somebody's clinging to something "like grim death" – it all gets a little Tennessee Williams. Without the drama.
Anyway because Jack Burden goes to work for Stark, the politician's corrupting influence manages to blight the lives of all of these good people. (The business with the Peytons involves a lot of rain, and everyone traipsing up and down the stairs to Adam's apartment in the French Quarter—he's described as a "recluse" and the "best medical doctor in Louisiana," which would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Naturally, Stark hires Adam to run a huge hospital for the poor and indigent. Yeah! Health care bureauracy: that'll do wonders for his mood.
Though James Horner's TITANICal, incredibly loud score indicate that Stark's rise and fall is the stuff of epic, the movie gives little sense that this politician's corruption has sunk to anything worse than an overpriced buffet meal and a dalliance with a burlesque girl (an eye-catching cameo by Olympic ice skater Nicole Bobek). That and hiring a nasty looking bodyguard (Jackie Earle Haley) who spends most of his time cleaning his gun, taking target practice and waiting for his big moment (this is one of two comeback roles for the BAD NEWS BEARS star))
When that moment comes, it's a great relief.
