message in the movies By Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

     
All the King's Men  Rated PG-13
Directed by Steve Zaillian.  Starring Sean Penn, Jude Law.   

Photos © Copyright Columbia Pictures
It’s not often that I can say this about a movie, but I can say it about All the King’s Men.  It is just a bad movie.  In fact, it is such an unqualified mess, it’s not even fair to single out any actor or crew member.  I’m not sure what went wrong, but nothing goes right in this adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1946 novel.  Robert Rossen had a crack at it back in 1950 and produced a film version which went on to win the Best Picture Academy Award.  The film tells the story of Willie Stark, a populist politician, full of promises for the common folk, and how his idealism eventually becomes co-opted by the greed and corruption that comes with great power.  Willie Stark is loosely based on the real life Huey “Kingfisher” Long, the governor (and later senator) or Louisiana who came to power during the Great Depression.  Although there are scenes that evoke the Depression, we never really see a historical context surrounding this tale. For some unknown reason, he film’s conclusion is set in the early 50s, which would make the entire story take place during and after World War II! (Well, that’s not mentioned, either.) Most of the real action takes place off-screen, so we’re left just with long, windy scenes of exposition on a few interior sets.  As played by Sean Penn, governor Stark is supposed to be a great “man of the people” and a terrific speaker.  Nothing in his speeches or delivery would indicate charisma, but we see throngs of people drop what they’re doing to stand enraptured by his words.  There’s a romance between a young reporter (Law, who is the narrator of the story) and a former friend (Kate Winslet) with nary a spark of passion.  James (Tony Soprano) Gandolfini plays the most mild-mannered and unthreatening “heavy” ever and Sir Anthony Hopkins gets his licks in as a principled judge.  The story jumps forward and backward in time so quickly, there’s no one to care for.  The musical score by James Horner is one of his worst ever, overbearing, dramatic, and monotonous.  All the King’s Men is a great morality play, reduced here to the level of a mediocre class book review assignment in which every character and plot twist is summarily checked off one at a time until you get to the end.  Praise the saints that this 2 hour 20 minute film has been trimmed down to just 120 minutes of interminable seat squirming.  My advice: Read the book or rent the 1950 film if you really want to encounter this story.

Pitchfork Rating: No halos. (Nothing works in this creaky adaptation of a great novel.)  One pitchfork. (For wasting two hours of my life; fortunately, you’ve been spared this time.)

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