All the King’s Men
Directed by Steven Zaillian
Writer-director Steven Zaillian, producer James Carville and star Sean Penn demolish All the King’s Men. The once-famous tale of a Southern politician who starts out a populist and becomes a despot (based on Louisiana’s Huey Long) no longer illuminates American politics; it flatters the filmmakers’ vanity. Zaillian directs in a somber, neo-classicist, let’s-just-call-it-noir style. Carville plays a baroque, self-mythologizing game, alluding to his part in the Bill Clinton circus. Penn rides a ham actor’s rocket ship to the farthest possible distance from subtlety.
This is no less of a mess than quasi-historical junk like A Beautiful Mind, The Death of Richard Nixon or The Road to Perdition but the fact that it’s a remake of a Best Picture Oscar winner indicates a shameless cultural decline. It’s a big-budget rebuttal to the original 1949 All the King’s Men, which was formerly regarded as a spectacular example of post-WWII Hollywood realism. Crusading director-writer Robert Rossen drained America’s political swamp. Rossen’s urgent style showed little finesse but it had firecracker conviction. He conjured anti-hero Willie Stark (played by Broderick Crawford) from Capra’s hometown heroes and anticipated Kazan’s working-class brutes. Crawford’s amazing performance lifted the character up from B-movie thug to an authentic public celebrity; you could see Stark’s climber appetite and read his cunning as he manipulated the hicks in his electorate as well as the rich ruling class with whom he rubbed elbows, knocked heads and shared hubris.
Since then, America’s concept of political villainy has changed. Consider the new casting of James Gandolfini as a stooge humiliated by Penn’s Willie Stark. Gandolfini, who resembles Crawford, might have clearly connected his Tony Soprano mob boss with official political ruthlessness—and possibly redeemed the pornographic indulgence of The Sopranos. But Zaillian prefers Penn’s angsty, actorish glamour and a supporting cast of mostly British actors (Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins), hoping to elevate the down-and-dirty tale. This obnoxious “elegance”—including three overwrought flashbacks just to establish the plot—is inferior to Rossen’s punchy blatancy.
Rossen caught lightning. His deliberate application of Citizen Kane’s muckraking motifs was downright thrilling—including Mercedes McCambridge’s 3-D update of the girl-reporter, a phenomenal morphing of Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell and Detour’s Ann Savage. These references had 1949 pop excitement, perfect for clearing away Hollywood sentimentality and expressing post-War disillusionment. But Zaillian & Co. flatten all cultural specifics by setting the story in an amorphous 1950s and substituting fake classicism for truth. Where Rossen exposed megalomania and class (critiquing the sexual magnetism of power), this remake drowns in its own expensive distractions. During Penn’s hyperbolic “Nail ’em up” speech, a montage of “real” faces disrupts the coiffured movie star context—all scored to Rocky-style theme music. Embarrassing.
Instead of Rossen’s then-shocking climax, Zaillian concocts a gaudy, stylized finale: political assassination, tabloid sensationalism and a painstaking, artsy tableaux. Zaillian appeals to our jaded familiarity with all manner of corruption. This remake isn’t a rabble-rouser, it’s dull and decadent.
