All the King's Men - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'All the King's Men': Miscast melange

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

Sean Penn plays an establishment-damning, everyman-loving public servant who slides into big-league politics only out of disgust with corrupt kingpins? And then, after winning office, becomes the thing he hated? And it's all drawn from a celebrated novel — itself a fictionalized account of charismatic Louisiana politician Huey P. Long — that conquered the big screen as an Oscar winner almost 60 years ago?

Now that sounds like a movie to cure the simpletonitis of late summer.

Sony Pictures

'All the King's Men'

2 out of 5 stars

The verdict: Fails to make an inherently colorful subject lively.

Director: Steven Zaillian
Starring: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson
Run time: 120 minutes
Release date: Sept. 22, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for an intense sequence of violence, sexual content and partial nudity.
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It is also, sad to say, a cure for insomnia. And for the common belief that British actors are so inherently classy and sophisticated they can play any role they're given.

Set in a vaguely Depression-era Louisiana, the story follows Penn's Willie Stark, whose tendency to object to graft and governmental incompetence isn't going over too well in podunk Mason City. He's so politically unsavvy that, when some kingmakers recruit him to run for governor, Stark doesn't realize he's only there to split "the hick vote" and allow a fat cat incumbent to keep his seat. When he puts two and two together, Stark's indignation lights up the sky — inspiring a streak of inflammatory eat-the-rich oratory (employing Penn's most flamboyant streak) that carries him easily into office.

That plot by itself could make for a gripping film, or for the first half of a rise-and-fall epic. Here, though, writer/director Steven Zaillian hustles through it on the way to a less dramatic conflict. After taking office and serving for an unclear tenure (the film shows us practically nothing of his reign), powerful lawmakers begin to call for Willie's impeachment — allowing Zaillian to pay even more attention to Jude Law's Jack Burden, the uncharismatic and less-than-convincing Southerner who was once a journalist and is now Stark's lackey, sent to dig up dirt on Judge Irwin, a prominent advocate for impeachment who happens to be a father figure to Jack.

The Judge, a patriarchal figure in the Louisiana establishment, is another entry in a saga we'll call The Great Miscastings of Anthony Hopkins (see "The Human Stain," "Zorro," et al.). But we wouldn't really mind turning a blind eye to Hopkins' accent, and Law's as well, if there were more diversions to be had in what ought to be an incredibly colorful tale. Instead, "King's Men" shies away from dramatically promising conflicts and shows them to us secondhand or third-hand.

An example: In one lushly staged nightclub scene, we see Stark get hot and bothered over a performer onstage. We know that he's married, and we might expect a tryst to cause some strife. Instead, the subject only comes up as the complaint of a third woman, whose affair with Stark hasn't even been mentioned until now and will never be shown.

Some of the movie's strange omissions and misplacements of emphasis could be the result of a last-ditch editing campaign. "All the King's Men" was originally slated for release in the thick of last fall's Oscar-contender season, but was postponed with little explanation. For all we mere audiences know, Zaillian may have delivered a three-and-a-half hour masterwork that studio heads thought was too unwieldy, forcing him to haggle over trims and revisions for months. Judging from the performances that made it to the screen, that seems unlikely. But you never know — the inner workings of Hollywood, like many a state capitol, are murky and strewn with unsatisfying compromises.