Movie Review of "All the King's Men" 2006

Written by: Andrew Ade, Deborah Mitchell and James Perkins.  Andrew Ade, Deborah Mitchell and James Perkins are members of the English and Public Relations Department at Westminster College.  Ade and Mitchell teach in the film studies minor. Perkins is a past president of the Robert Penn Warren Circle.

Moviegoers familiar with All the King's Men will likely regard director Steven Zaillian's new film of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as an ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying attempt to adapt great literature for the screen. 

Zaillian, whose high-profile track record includes the screenplays for Schindler's List, Gangs of New York, and Searching for Bobby Fischer, has created a Technicolor film noir, recovering story elements of the novel that were lost in Robert Rossen's previous film adaptation that won the 1949 Academy Award for Best Picture. The new film treatment widens the scope of the action to include episodes, past and present, in the private lives of the reporter Jack Burden (Jude Law) and the Stanton siblings, Adam and Anne (Mark Ruffalo and Kate Winslet), beyond their involvement in the rise and fall of Governor Willie Stark (Sean Penn). Jack in particular, the haunted narrator of Warren's novel, figures here as the reserved and stoic, upper-class man of thought, balanced against Willie, the self proclaimed populist "hick," the flamboyant, emotional, energetic and flawed man of action. 

The decision to extend the film's action to the lives of the kingmakers as much as to that of the king (Willie) is understandable, given that one of the executive producers is political strategist James Carville, a kingmaker himself, who has recently called All the King's Men the best novel ever written about American politics. Zaillian reshuffles scenes from the novel to simplify Jack's complex inner struggle as he ponders the determining moments in his arid private life while wrestling with the ethical questions of his complicity in Willie's ascendancy. For all that is gained, however, in adding Jack Burden's story as a counterpoint to the political parable of Willie Stark, the resulting film narrative is disjointed and at times incoherent. The juxtaposed scenes of Jack's adolescent inability to connect with family and girlfriend Anne and the charged incidents of Willie's increasing recklessness and corruption fail to find the connecting tissue that would explain their interrelation. In the absence of illuminating dramatic moments, we are left only to guess at Jack's moral dilemma, which leaves little trace on Law's relentlessly impassive face. 

Dialogue sheds scant light on plot or characterization. Zaillian's sift through Warren's dense, challenging, metaphoric language for nuggets turns up empty. Willy's pronouncement, "We all dirt," falls back to earth with a thud, lost amid the hesitant southern accents and confusing thematic elements. One cannot help speculating on the film footage left on the cutting room floor that would surely have clarified the relationship between the characters' interior landscapes and the public political ones. 

The film more successfully captures the novel's ambiance of aristocratic decay and restless resentment of the disenfranchised. Pawal Edelman's cinematography yields up a gloomy, almost submarine atmosphere of an American South submerged in economic stagnation while his sharp sense of character proxemics visually records the widening gap between Willy and his constituents. Oddly, Zaillian coyly disguises the story's principal historical source. The opening shot's focus on the Great Seal of Louisiana and the glimpse of Willie recording Huey Long's song "Every Man a King," center this version more specifically in Louisiana and suggest Long's controversial governorship and assassination more than Warren ever did in his novel. Yet Zaillian also moves up the time of the story to the early 1950s rather than keep to the late 1930s of Long's era-an unnecessary feat of misdirection that is at odds with the film's shots of a seemingly race-integrated Southern population. 

Literary purists will object to the fact that Zaillian's script perpetuates the myth that Judge Irwin was Jack's biological father. Zaillian even supports this misreading by adding a scene in which Jack looks through a scrapbook of his life at Judge Irwin's desk after the Judge's suicide-a scene not in the novel. 

Despite such distractions, the film has strong performances by James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, Anthony Hopkins, Kathy Baker, and especially Penn, whose Willie Stark exudes both the charisma of the demagogue and the thrill of the unbridled power seeker. Moviegoers prompted to take up the novel must decide for themselves the wisdom of preserving the expansive story of Robert Penn Warren's classic for this film version. Given the divided reception of the film's opening weekend, Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men may very well drop like a $55,000,000 stone in the bayou, leaving few ripples and becoming no more than a footnote in Robert Penn Warren studies.

More Stories