The tragedy of Southern politics
Movies
In this season of great expectations and diminished achievements,
the remake of All the King’s Men may surpass The Black Dahlia as the most disappointing work of them all. In
adapting Robert Penn Warren’s well-known novel and updating the original movie,
the new film purportedly suggests some contemporary connection to the Hurricane
Katrina disaster and the revelations of the dishonesty and incompetence of the
present administration. Whether intentional or not, those aspirations to
relevance hardly justify the comprehensive clumsiness of just about every
element of the picture.
The story of the rise and fall of a populist demagogue,
Willie Stark (Sean Penn), a character based on the legendary Huey Long, follows
a familiar trajectory and supports the usual pieties about the corrupting
effects of power. Stark begins his political career as an honest municipal
treasurer in some Louisiana
hamlet who tries to warn the citizens about the local politicians’ crooked
construction contracts. When an accident at a new school kills three children,
he becomes something of a hero and attracts the attention of both the press and
the political wheeler-dealers, who run him for governor, intending to use him
as a wedge to split what the film’s narrator, the reporter Jack Burden (Jude
Law), calls “the cracker vote.”
When he learns of the manipulation, Willie strikes out on
his own, delivering a rousing stump speech, speaking at county fairs, in swamps
and bayous, to farmers, shrimpers, factory workers,
and, yes, crackers all over the state. He wins the election, of course, but
apparently — one must guess at this, since the movie practices a weird
reticence about almost everything —suffers from his own fatal hubris, which
drives him into personal and political corruption and finally, assassination.
This entirely misguided motion picture essentially runs away
from Warren’s
fascinating and instructive narrative into some bizarre interpretation that
mostly disregards its ostensible subject, transforming the story of Willie
Stark into the story of Jack Burden. As his name — a popular one in Southern
fiction — suggests, Jack suffers from a number of common regional ailments,
including a heritage of aristocratic decadence, the oppressive weight of
history, a callow romanticism, and a dependence on bourbon. Although he appears
on screen more than anyone else, Jude Law’s soppy, passive performance turns
the reporter into a weak, insipid, and quite inconsequential character. (That
sound you hear is the harmonic hum of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams
spinning in their graves.)
Law hardly deserves all the blame for the film’s failure. He
nobly shares the ineptitude with the usually admirable Sean Penn, who seems
totally miscast as a powerful, charismatic politician. Waving his short arms in
the same graceless gestures whether recording his song, “Every Man a King,” or
speaking to a crowd, or orchestrating the movements of a sultry stripper, Penn
looks constrained and uncomfortable throughout. His attempt at a Southern
accent somehow strangles his diction, so that he swallows a good deal of his
dialogue and never lets it escape.
Though completely underused and limited to a few lines of
dialogue (and even fewer gestures), James Gandolfini
provides the only strong physical presence in the movie; his corpulence also
reminds us of the burly Broderick Crawford, who won an Academy Award for his
Willie Stark in 1949. Nobody, by the way, generates the fierceness and passion
of Mercedes McCambridge as Willie’s mistress —
Patricia Clarkson’s version of the character seems merely exhausted.
Beyond those defects, however, Steven Zaillian’s
script and direction retreat from the opportunity to construct a dynamic and
vigorous narrative. He simply refuses to show exactly how Willie strays from
his promises, instead presenting most of the major action off screen, so that
Burden and Sadie Burke (Clarkson), like some badly imagined chorus, must talk
about developments the audience is never allowed to see. Whether intentionally
or not, the director edits out just about all the major thematic points and
supplies no convincing reason for the tragedy of Willie Stark, a waste of a
significant American novel and a classic Hollywood
film.
All the King’s Men (PG-13),
directed by Steven Zaillian, is now playing at
Pittsford, Henrietta 18, Tinseltown, Greece
Ridge 12, and Eastview 13.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2006.
