..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

All The
King's Men

So, what’s wrong with All The Kings Men?

If you had only one target to affix, it would have to be on writer(adapter)/director Steven Zaillian, who shows breathtaking arrogance in his effort to top the 1949 original based on the Robert Penn Warren novel.

Like any 57 year old film, there are certainly areas for improvement from the original. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman, in coordination with his director, takes a massive leap in shooting the beauty and the blight of Louisiana. Look back at the earlier film and you will be quickly reminded that it was shot almost entirely on sound stages.

Also, the freedom to be more direct about racial matters is significant... but not really taken advantage of here.

The freedom to be more forthright about sexual matters is taken up a bit, though still, Zaillian manages to be both overt and coy. And the truth of the matter is, this is not really a story about sex, except as in its relation to power. Yet, we still get the right-from-The-Right-Stuff strippers and exotics on stage for Willie Stark’s amusement.

And that brings us to Sean Penn, about whom it has to be said that his performance will divide audiences like the staff of Moses (if not that evenly). Yes, he’s chewing scenery. But Willie is chewing scenery. His bluster is his sword and his shield. And that idea in the characterization is fine. But Zaillian doesn’t bring that to life. And one of the character decisions that I find emblematic of this performance and the whole movie is the fat padding Penn puts on with what appears to be some irregularity. Penn is not a big guy. Broderick Crawford was. But like Dustin Hoffman taking on Willie Loman in the shadow of Lee J. Cobb, the smart call would be to use the little man against the big guy things. Instead, he is somewhere in the middle. And it doesn’t quite play.

The lead of this film, more than in the original, is Jude Law’s Jack Burden. And Law is excellent here. But the film runs off the rails by becoming Burden’s story even more than Stark’s, while in the original, Burden provided the point-of-view and was party to many of the story points. Here, it all seems to end up rotating around him, while Willie Stark just becomes a greedier version of what he was to start, believing his rhetoric to the end.

Kate Winslet is fine, but basically plays The Girl. Anthony Hopkins has too much screen time as the conscience that catches the king... and worse, he seems to be walking through what has become the Hopkins version of the Morgan Freeman role. (Fortunately, Freeman turns up in another film at this festival, 10 Items Or Less, in fine comic form.) James Gandolfini is reduced to playing the kind of role he used to play before The Sopranos. Jackie Earle Haley’s role as Stark’s driver/bodyguard/sidekick has been reduced from the original and repeated scenes of him shooting are not only bad foreshadowing, they are, in the end, false foreshadowing. And Mark Ruffalo must be all over that cutting room floor as his performance seems to be a mere prop to the storytelling, a few moments too important to cut... but it feels like someone would have been happier to lose the entire character.

But hey, it all comes back to that script. It feels like it was written for a 4 hour epic and that they edited out everything of weight, leaving only the story and as much of Kate Winslet and Tony Hopkins as they could. It is so insanely complex and so unsuccessful in giving us a reason for appreciating the complexity that while there are many quality pieces, there is no excuse.

And as with movies this self-important, you always, desperately need the great memorable lines of dialogue. And there are none here. There are moments that click, but none that stick. And that is movie death.

I’m not saying it’s the worst movie you’ll see this year, this month, or this week. There is too much well-intended effort for it to be that bad. But judged on the scale it sets for itself, it is one of the year’s most profound disappointments.

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- David Poland