All the King's Men
by Catherine Lee

      "If you don't vote, you don't count," bellows Sean Penn as Willie Stark in Steven Zaillian's new screen adaptation of All the

King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In the new film this line is delivered to a down-and-out looking crowd shortly after Willie Stark realizes that his campaign to become governor of Louisiana is a scam. The political machine of the state, worried that it might lose power, has sent its operatives to Mr. Stark, encouraging him to run to split the vote of those unhappy with the greedy and corrupt powers that be. 

      When Willie figures out he's been backed to "split the hick vote," it sets him on fire. He drops the rather dull, formal remarks he's been stumping across the state and starts speaking like the man he is. He's a hick, a nobody, but he's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. He berates and cajoles crowds of hicks, making sure they understand that voting for a fellow hick is the only way things are going to change. 

      Warren's novel, considered the first and still one of the best novels about American politics ever written, tells of the rise and fall of a charismatic politician corrupted by power and very common human weaknesses. Its also a very Southern story, full of some purple prose, Oedipal issues and the decay of aristocratic Southern families and their clash with upstarts like Willie Stark. 

      When Willie scolds the crowd with "If you don't vote, you don't count," a statement as true today as it ever has been, I hoped Zaillian's film was about to take off and defy the bad buzz that has plagued this film. What I loved about the novel (and the earlier screen adaptation starring Broderick Crawford) is the story of what happens to a well intentioned man when he starts believing his own press releases. 

      Unfortunately, there is very little of that in this version of the story. We get a taste of Willie as an honest man, but that's all before he becomes governor. The new film is structured in a way that emphasizes the downfall. All the King's Men begins with Stark as a bully and then flashes back to how he got to be that way. We get almost nothing of Willie as anything other than a liar and a cheat.  And this sucks the life out of the movie. It is hard to understand what all the fuss is about without showing us more of Willie's transformation. 

      The guy is such a jerk, why do all the people around him engage in so much soul searching and ambivalence about him? It seems as soon as he's governor he's under the cloud of impeachment for corruption. As a campaigner he talks about roads and schools and helping working people. As governor, we're never shown a moment of addressing those concerns, except as the corrupt force that has governed the politics of the state. We're all familiar with politicians who are phonies from the get go.  There's not much drama in a guy who goes from "honest" to awful just by getting elected.

      Of course, any filmmaker is entitled to interpret or reinvent a novel or a film in whatever way he or she chooses. But if you choose a known text and you mess with it, it had better work. I don't think that a viewer not burdened, as I am, with an affection for the book and the earlier film will be any less confused by why all these people are so obsessed with this guy. 

      The story here (as in the novel and earlier film) is told through Jack Burden, a newspaper reporter who is also the scion of one of the wealthy families Willie's election infuriates. Without Willie doing anything demonstrably good and true as governor, it is very hard to understand why Jack, no matter how distressed he is by his class or his family, would follow this guy and betray them.  Jack is played by the too beautiful Jude Law. His pale eyes and ridiculous good looks help him embody a paralyzed, privileged lost soul who isn't sure what to do with his talent and his good looks, but you still want to kick him. 

      All the King's Men ends up being as much about how Jack and his family and friends, none of them particularly sympathetic characters in this adaptation, are programmed to self destruct as surely as Willie is. A movie just doesn't afford the time, the way a novel does,  to tell both sides of this story with the detail necessary to bring them to life. What we see is a muddle. 

      And the responsibility for this muddle can be put on no one but screenwriter/director Steven Zaillian.  Zaillian is primarily a screenwriter (he won an Oscar for his screenplay of Schindler's List). This is his third film as a director, and he does not sit comfortably in the role of both writer and director. The screenplay never gets a good hold on the story. You can feel that there were whole scenes of politics and relationships that somehow vanished once the director and his editor realized they just had too much material. There are some lovely visual flourishes, but they don't add up to anything. 

      There are wonderful actors in this film. Beyond Sean Penn and Jude Law, neither of them living up to their talent, are a lot of talented people also not living up to their talent: Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo and Patricia Clarkson. They all seem lost, as if the director isn't really paying attention to them. He's so worried about making the whole project come together, he just assumes they'll be great. Even great actors need direction. And to emphasize this mess is an oppressive score that swells whenever we're supposed to feel something. 

      Supposed "quality" pictures that don't deliver are no tragedy; but as suits with little interest in quality increasingly dominate Hollywood, every misfire like All the King's Men makes it more likely that movies with any aspirations beyond the bottom line will get harder to make. This week, it is scary to think that Jackass: Number 2, which I haven't seen, may have come by its better reviews and superior box office revenue legitimately.

Catherine Lee is the executive director of Fort Wayne Cinema Center, the only independently operated movie theater in Fort Wayne, specializing in independent, foreign, documentary, specialty and classic films.

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