Directed by: Steven Zaillian
Starring: Sean Penn, Jude Law
Rating:
One of the big assignments during my junior year of high school was a lengthy term paper about a classic novel of our choice. I picked All the King's Men, the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Robert Penn Warren, about two very different Southern gentleman: a rabble-rousing politician named Willie Stark (who was not-so-loosely modeled on real-life Louisiana governor Huey Long) and Jack Burden, the cynical newspaperman who becomes his right-hand man. I learned a lot of things over the three months it took to write that paper--who this Huey Long person was, the school of literature that Penn Warren emerged from and what the heck was going on in that whole novel-within-the-novel section that takes up the middle chunk of the book. I also learned that All the King's Men was essentially unfilmable, at least as a conventional two-hour movie. Some novels you read and can visualize right away how they'll play onscreen. But Men is such a dense, intricately structured novel that doing it justice would require a miniseries at least. Even the 1949 movie version, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, didn't really crack the book. In fact, it would have been more accurate if they had titled that film The Willie Stark Story, since the focus was shifted entirely off Burden and onto the Stark character. It's probably because of that movie that Stark is remembered as the "hero" of All the King's Men. If you go back to the source material, though, you'll see right away that Penn Warren was really writing Burden's story.
The new movie version, written and directed by Steven Zaillian, attempts to rectify some of the mistakes of its predecessor, but it winds up butchering the novel further. I'm completely serious when I say that if it weren't for Underworld: Evolution, All the King's Men would easily qualify as the worst film I've seen this year. Come to think of it, it might actually deserve that title more than Len Wiseman's piece of garbage if only because of the sheer waste of talent on display. This is a misfire of almost epic proportions, a lavishly produced but wholly hollow and nonsensical adaptation of a magnificently constructed novel. The studio behind the movie famously postponed its 2005 release date to give Zaillian more time in the editing room, but it seems that all he did was to simply hack away at the film until only the bare spine of a story remained. Even as someone who has read the book multiple times, I had trouble following the movie because it was so choppy; sequences don't flow together as much as they slam into each other and characters frequently wander in and out of frame without making it clear why they are in a particular scene. I feel particularly sorry for Patricia Clarkson, Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo who are playing crucial roles, which have been all but edited out of the movie in favor of the man playing Stark, who in this case is Sean Penn. Penn, of course, is one of our great modern actors, but even he's not immune to the overacting bug, as he previously showed in the excruciating I Am Sam and, to a lesser extent, in Mystic River. He gets to yell and scream a lot in Men, but his performance is all sideshow bluster. Part of the problem is that Zaillian has Stark transform from crusading populist to adulterous demagogue almost overnight. To his credit, the writer/director does seem to realize that Burden (played by Jude Law) is an important part of the story, but he's unable to successfully integrate him into the movie's narrative. All of his scenes apart from Stark feel oddly abbreviated, as if important details were left on the cutting room floor in the rush to get back to Penn's theatrics. Zaillian tries to patch up the holes with voiceover narration, but it's too little too late. As the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel represents the worst tendencies of summer blockbusters, so to does All the King's Men stand as the nadir of big-budget prestige pictures.
