REVIEWED - ALL THE KING'S MEN: Despite a juicy subject and stars aplenty, this remake of Robert Rossen's 1949 classic about the rise and fall of a red state firebrand is a disaster on just about every level, writes Michael Dywer
THE second cinema treatment of All the King's Men appeared to be steeped in Academy Awards pedigree. Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel, on which it's based, collected a Pulitzer Prize. Steven Zaillian, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Schindler's List, wrote the screenplay adaptation. Doubling as director, Zaillian attracted a stellar cast of awards ceremony regulars. And Robert Rossen's 1949 screen version had won three Oscars, for best picture, best actor (Broderick Crawford) and best supporting actress (Mercedes McCambridge).
Zaillian's treatment was originally set to open last December, but post-production delays pushed back the release until now, as another awards season looms. With all that extra time on his hands, Zaillian appears to have spent too long in the editing suite; finally finished, his film emerges as laboured and convoluted. Since its world premiere at the Toronto festival last month, it has vanished off the Oscar radar.
Sean Penn gamely takes on the pivotal role of Willy Stark, a corrupt politician modelled on Huey Long, who, in a landslide victory, was elected state governor of Louisiana during the Depression. Penn throws himself into a grandstanding performance with characteristic passion. When Stark goes on the campaign trail - proving to be a powerful, stirring orator who relates to his fellow hicks, as he calls them - the veins in Penn's neck are strained to the point where they might burst.
We observe Stark's rise and fall through the cynical eyes of Jack Burden (a low-key Jude Law), the film's narrator, a journalist from a wealthy family. As Burden joins the campaign team, Zaillian distracts from the Stark saga as the emphasis shifts to the rather less compelling personal and ethical dilemmas faced by Burden in his relationships with a former lover (Kate Winslet in an underwritten role), her doctor brother (Mark Ruffalo, morose) and a retired judge (Anthony Hopkins, oddly accented) who treated Burden as if he were his own son.
Zaillian insists that his film is a fresh interpretation of the novel and that he didn't watch the Rossen version before making his own. If he had, he might have become aware of the crucial structural problems in his awkwardly formed screenplay, which is all too sketchy in depicting Stark's unconvincing, apparently overnight transformation from teetotal door-to-door salesman to cunning, boozy politician with a socialist platform.
There are more gaps, as Zaillian the director cedes to Zaillian the screenwriter. Some of the more interesting developments happen off-camera and are noted solely through verbal references. The film is fatally lacking in the clarity and unerring sense of drama that shaped Rossen's more conventional but far more effective treatment.
Instead, Zaillian's version is confused and confusing, and strains self-consciously to seem stylish. Most of the formidable leading players are miscast and speak in variable southern accents that are often indecipherable. And Zaillian resorts all too frequently to James Horner's mood-signalling score, which is as overblown and overbearing as the film itself.
