Review of All the King's Men (2006) by Markb. — 06 Nov 2006

They really DON'T make them like they used to, do they? Robert Rossen's original, Oscar-winning film version of Robert Penn Warren's acclaimed novel about corrupt, Huey Long-like Southern politician Willie Stark wasn't exactly a masterpiece of subtlety and nuance--it was a 1949 Columbia movie that played like a 1941 Warner Bros.

one, complete with montages by Don Siegel--but it was a terrific melodrama that moved like lightning, featured the definitive Broderick Crawford performance as Stark, and asked the audience to ponder such tough questions as: is our political system (or anyone else's) so fundamentally tainted that it eventually ruins all good, ethical men, or do you have to be crooked beyond repair to successfully pursue a political career in the first place? (I've always found it interesting and a bit paradoxical that writer/director Rossen had problems with alleged Communist allegations, since Stark runs and wins as a revolutionary figure out to topple the powers that be.

) Steven Zaillian claimed that he was filming Warren's book, not remaking the movie (which he says he never saw)...and that's the first of his problems. This version assumes that "literary" is synonymous with "pompous", "overlong" and "boring"; it features a huge cast full of Big Names, never mind if they're miscast or not (which they mostly are), and it includes a smotheringly self-important music score by the usually capable James Horner that cues us in that we're watching a Big, Important Movie that's going to teach us some Big, Important Lessons (and hopefully pick up some Oscar nominations while it's at it).

Sean Penn, who plays Stark here, is of course normally a hundred times the actor that Crawford ever was (Crawford tended to repeat his Oscar-winning performance as Stark in virtually every other movie he ever made) but you sure can't tell it here; in one of the worst jobs of a fine career, he mumbles in an endless stream of inscrutable, potatoes-in-mouth Method-speak (when he isn't screaming with equal unintelligibility at his constituents and the audience).

..and his hairstyle makes him look so much like Lyle Lovett that I kept wanting to ask him how life was treating him after the breakup with Julia! Jude Law, as an idealistic reporter who gets caught in the whirlwind, reminds us once again why we all got good and tired of him after his appearances in six mostly crummy movies in 2004.

Even the great Patricia Clarkson is ineffectual in Mercedes McCambridge's old role as Stark's cynical campaign manager; I'm tempted to chalk it up to Clarkson's natural on-screen warmth being out of place for such an unlikable character but then remembered that she actually did pull off a mostly unsympathetic role in 2003's Pieces of April.

Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn used to judge a movie by how much it made his rear end wiggle uncomfortably out of sheer boredom; he would've had no problem with the original, but this version would've given his ass a serious case of St.

Vitus Dance--at least up until the astoundingly pretentious, self-consciously symbolic and wildly hilarious assassination finale in which the blood of two characters slowly intermingles so that Zaillian can make a statement about how various types of evil are interconnected.

..that instead comes off as an oddly reassuring demonstration of how filmmakers as normally intelligent as Zaillian (who wrote Schindler's List and wrote and directed Searching For Bobby Fisher and A Civil Action) are just as capable of making horribly boneheaded missteps as us ordinary everyday average folks can be.