Populist Mechanics

According to the publicity material for All the King¹s Men, bringing Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel of the same name to the screen again has always been "a cherished dream" of executive producer James Carville -- suggesting a lurking sense of payback frustration with the insubstantial legacy of the real populist Southerner Carville helped to elect president. But first, let's consider the project from the cheap seats, where it would appear to belong to Sean Penn. Let loose with what is remembered as a large, meaty, all-American role within a properly Pulitzered and still-school-assigned mega-fiction (filmed already in 1949 and showered with forgotten Oscars), Penn goes for larger than life, wrapping his pinched frown around an unintelligible Louisiana drawl and swinging his arms like an autistic evangelist. (Maybe it's the hick Eraserhead hair, encouraging us to place this cracker politician somewhere between Penn's special kid in I Am Sam and his obliviously narcissistic guitarist in Sweet and Lowdown.)

Character-wise, Penn is most effective at boiling pots with tight lids; he's an internal combustion engine, and here the actor he strains to echo most is 1930s ham-hock Paul Muni. A small man, Penn even tries to evoke the working-class blubber of the original version's star, Broderick Crawford (and the character's model, Huey Long), pushing out his belly and swaggering like he's got 100 more pounds to heave around than he actually has. It's a florid, vein-popping spectacle, trying too hard and, in the end, seeming to know little about dirt-poor Americans.

Even so, Steven Zaillian's film is faithful to Warren in that it centers not on Penn's Willie Stark, 1930s redneck do-gooder turned corrupt Louisiana governor, but on his cynical, ethically vacant right-hand man, Jack Burden (Jude Law), who narrates Stark's rise from small-time pot-stirrer to party stooge to self-made demagogue to, finally, a people's leader easily given over to the dark side of legislative malfeasance and back-room skullduggery. Zaillian proceeds in typical adapt-a-big-book fashion, condensing, telegraphing and boiling down drama into info-bites amid far too much smoky backlighting and a James Horner score that's so self-important you want to take out the timpani with a grenade launcher.

Law is no asset. Looking rather sadly like John Ireland (the actor who played the 1949 Jack Burden), he has little control over his accent, and zero energy. Drowning his conscience in bourbon, Burden seems less despairingly snockered than simply uninterested. A Bogartian voice of dry fatalism, Burden is both the tale's spoiled innocent and its crypt-keeper, doomily recounting the descent into iniquity -- his own and everyone else's, including Stark's girl-toy, Sadie (Patricia Clarkson), Burden's lost childhood love, Anne (Kate Winslet), and her brother Adam (Mark Ruffalo), an idealistic doctor that Jack suckered into Starkian service. Each suffers a dark night of the soul, or so it's implied; Zaillian seems less concerned with making the novel's intricate political machinations clear than simply filling virtually every scene with crucifixes. It's hard to say why Stark is on the cusp of being impeached by the state senate, or why the public opinion of Jack's retired-judge stepfather (Anthony Hopkins) is a matter of political life or death that warrants a historical investigation consuming half of the film's screen time. But it's clear from the lurking crosses that there's plenty of damnation, retribution and redemption to be dished out to all concerned.

As if the film had a ponderous-metaphor deficiency, Stark's hollerin'-governor press conferences are staged like fascist rallies, on the nighttime capitol steps. (Not that symbology wasn't available; the film was shot in a pre-Katrina Louisiana that appears to be virtually devoid of black people.) Carville or not, All the King's Men is something of a naive dinosaur; for one thing, populist preachifiers with hammerhead morals were artifacts of the 1800s. Pitching a fit over the lost idealism of the American machine seems a little thin once you realize, as Carville surely has, that the Huey Longs were aberrations, and the massive scale of corporate wrongdoing easily overshadows, in cost and blood and influence, any governor's graft habit or blackmail scheme. It surely would be sweet to believe that American government would be a clean-running engine if it weren't for the scum-class four-flushers meddling with popular opinion and gaining access to the halls of power they didn't buy. Propagandist and elite-exceptionalist Walter Lippmann would have approved of Warren's scenario, whereby the likes of bootstrap kid Bill Clinton rising to the presidency is part of the problem, but George W. Bush taking the same seat is just how things are supposed to pan out for scions of the industrial aristocracy.