All the King's Men (2006)

Those films had a clarity of vision and a clarity of exposition that made them truly engaging, even—if not especially—when characters and situations turned out to be more complicated than we thought. But All the King's Men is just murky and muddled throughout. This film was originally going to come out one year ago, but it was held back because those who saw it found it confusing and hard to follow. Zaillian spent months re-editing the film, but apparently to no avail; all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put this movie back together again.

Sean Penn as Willie Stark, a Louisiana politician

The film does have a talented cast, and it's not hard to see why so many worthy actors were willing to hop on this particular bandwagon. The film is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, which in 1949 became a film that won Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, and Supporting Actress; and there was every reason to believe that a new version might get some of that attention, too. But most of them never get a chance to make much of an impression, in the end.

There are exceptions to this. Sean Penn, who has often been criticized for going over the top or taking himself too seriously, is almost ideally suited for the part of Willie Stark, a Louisiana politician who wins the heart of "hick" voters by railing against the establishment in big, loud speeches and making lofty promises to clean things up once he becomes state governor. At first, he seems like a relatively innocent idealist—his wife's a schoolteacher, he drinks nothing stronger than orange soda pop—but once he takes office, he turns out to be just as corrupt as the people he replaced.

The problem is, his transformation happens much, much too quickly. I was reminded of how one of the main criticisms of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is that the Jack Nicholson character became so crazy, so soon, that there was nowhere left for him to go for the rest of the movie; in All the King's Men, Stark's transformation from decent bumpkin to cynical sleazebag seems to happen even more quickly, and any drama that might have been milked from his fall from grace is pretty much lost.

Jude Law as reporter Jack Burden

Then again, on one level, the story isn't really about Stark. The Louisiana governor's rise to power is witnessed through the eyes of Jack Burden (Jude Law), a reporter who comes from a more affluent background than Stark; he takes a shine to the "hick" politician, so much so that he quits his job at the newspaper when the editors complain that his pro-Stark columns are at odds with the paper's endorsement of one of the other candidates. Given how corrupt Stark becomes so soon in the story, it is difficult to see what Burden sees in the man; but he lets himself be used, as Stark gets him to work his contacts with the upper class for political gain.

Stark also tells Burden to dig deep into the background of Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins), a political opponent who also happens to be the closest thing Burden ever had to a father. Stark wants something that he can smear the judge with, and he insists, despite Burden's protests, that every man, no matter how seemingly innocent, has something to hide—something that can be brought into the light.

This taps into one of the film's key themes, which is that everyone is tainted by sin—and you don't have to be a Christian to impose that reading on the film, since the movie takes place decades ago in the Bible Belt, in a time and place when characters like Stark could easily connect with the masses by peppering their speech with explicitly religious language. Crucifixes are a recurring visual motif, and the house of one character with a secret to hide is filled with Catholic icons and lit candles.

Jack with old friends Anne (Kate Winslet) and Adam (Mark Ruffalo)

But if sin is this film's subject, then what is sin, exactly? Stark mixes his religious rhetoric with references to evolution and privately tells one character that goodness is just something that people make up as they go along; if you'll pardon the metaphor (and this is not how he puts it), Stark suggests in effect that the only way to rise above the filth of the world is to b.s. our way into believing in something better—but it's still b.s., which isn't really all that different from filth, is it?

What's missing from this film is a profound sense of goodness, absent though it may be from the lives of these characters. Burden occasionally pines for a sort of lost innocence—especially when he reflects on his childhood with friends Adam (Mark Ruffalo) and Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet)—but goodness and innocence are not quite the same thing. Neither Stark nor the film show any real awareness of the goodness that human beings have fallen from and have the potential to return to.

So much for the film's thematic problems. Then there are the narrative problems, beginning with the fact that the bulk of this story has been moved to the 1950s. The original novel was inspired by the career of Huey P. Long, the Louisiana politician who served as governor and senator between 1928 and 1935, and Stark's politics—his populist, big-spending programs—fit perfectly within the cultural dynamics of the Great Depression. But, as Victor Morton has asked, would they really have been all that popular during the booming post-war economy of the Eisenhower era?

Stark wants to find the dirt on Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins)

The film also takes a while to find its footing, lurching as it does from the present to the past to something in between and then flashing back to something even further back in the past—and that's all just in the first few reels. Things like that kill a story's momentum. In addition, Zaillian repeatedly violates the law of "show, don't tell," by having his characters constantly tell each other things that we really ought to be able to see for ourselves. And he shows very little interest in the practical social realities within which these characters live. What sort of interactions does Willie Stark have with his fellow politicians, nemeses though many of them may be? Why do the senators suddenly want to impeach him? Yes, yes, we know they are in the pockets of Big Oil, but what has Stark done that he could be impeached for?