One question: why? Why remake a Best Picture Oscar winner? Why keep it on the shelf for a year? Why populate it with some of the best actors Hollywood has to offer with some of the worst accents and overacting we´re likely to see this year? And most importantly: why should anyone give a flying fig about "All the King´s Men"?
The plot centers around Willie Stark (Sean Penn), a community treasurer whose mind is slowly filled with delusions of grandeur by powerful people who work behind the scenes. He eventually rises to the governorship of Louisiana, riding a wave of public support based on campaign promises there is no way he can fulfill. He takes out his opponents using a combination of blackmail and violence, one of whom happens to be a lifelong friend of Stark´s closest confidant, Jack Burden (Jude Law).
Oscar Winner Sean Penn, Emmy Winner James Gandolfini, Oscar Winner Anthony Hopkins, Oscar Nominee Jude Law, Oscar Nominee Kate Winslet, Oscar Nominee Patricia Clarkson, Oscar Winner Steve Zallian. With a pedigree like that, you would think "All the King´s Men" would be a shoe in for every single award on every continent on the planet Earth. Let´s face facts: combining these actors in a Zallian production (he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for "Schindler´s List") has to be one of the surest things there possibly can be on the screen. Yet, for all the talent on the screen, "All the King´s Men" is just a complete and utter mess.
One of the first and most major problems is that that audience is expected to accept everything at face value that every character says. For instance, when we meet Stark he seems like a man with his head screwed on straight. He did all he could in order to expose corruption in the county which caused shortcuts to be taken in building a new schoolhouse. The result? Children died when a faulty fire escape couldn´t help them. He doesn´t drink because his wife doesn´t like it. Stark is a good and honest man. Then, somehow, his ego becomes so huge that he thinks everything and everybody is beneath him. Is it the massive crowds that begin to flock to his flamboyant speeches? Possibly. Is it the fact that a self-described "hick" has won a majority of voters hearts? Quite probably. But it all comes down to one reason: he has bought into his own hype.
Perhaps this "evolution" in the Stark character is best summed up as the following: he is a man who was pushed to believe he was great. The characters who inhabit this movie are also pushed to believe Stark is a great man. However, the audience never is. The rest of the film hinges on this fact. If we´re in Stark´s corner, then everyone who is against him becomes a villain and the ending is poignant. If we don´t buy this man, the entire two hour production becomes an exercise in futility. And that´s exactly what we have: futility.
But let´s move away from this "great man" argument. Apparently, Stark´s enemies-legislators who are bringing an impeachment vote to the state congress-believe he is "destroying the constitution". Sorry, come again? What exactly was he doing that destroys the constitution? His campaign promises to the people in the state include building new roads, schools and hospitals, especially for the poor. As far as I´m concerned, that is a positive. Now, some of the tactics he uses, such as the blackmail of Judge Irwin (Hopkins), aren´t ethical…but the constitution is not being destroyed.
There´s some subplot about a girl (Winslet) Jack was smitten with in the past and her brilliant doctor brother (Adam, played by Mark Ruffalo) who fall in with Stark. Anne supposedly has some sort of affair with Willie, which ropes Adam into putting his name next to Stark´s on a hospital…a hospital that is being used for corruption like the kind Willie once fought against.
I don´t want to leave out one of the lamest and left field twists of the year: the big revelation near the end that Irwin, a father figure to Anne, Adam and Jack wasn´t just a kindly man who liked kids. Oh no! It turns out that he´s actually Jack´s father…and Jack drives him to suicide because of some story from earlier in his life about a woman, a bank and money…
Know what? I couldn´t follow all the plot machinations while watching the flick, so there´s no way I can even begin to try to connect the dots for anyone else. In plain English, this movie is a mess.
In one of the most unintentionally funny moments in the entire film (and perhaps the most telling for Willie´s character), he says Tiny Duffy (Gandolfini) was picked to be the lieutenant governor because "somebody had to be lieutenant governor". This shows, more than anything else in the film, just how over his head Stark found himself once he won the governorship. I´ll tell ya, "All the King´s Men" isn´t a comedy, but my audience was chuckling-if not full out belly-laughing-through most of it. Was it because the movie is wholly implausible? Entirely possible.
There are a mishmash of other subplots and characters just thrown into the script for no apparent reason. According to reports, Zallian wrote the script straight from the novel by Robert Penn Warren and never viewed the original film.
Penn, who can normally be counted on as the acting rock in any movie, is a wild and maniacal man throughout the film. It can be understood during his campaign speeches, but he goes so far as to have an impromptu public speech on the steps of the capital berating the congress and state court. The problem isn´t these actions, it´s the way in which Penn acts them out. It´s as if he´s trying to win the award for most over the top performance in the history of film. This isn´t a silent film, so there´s no reason for the crazed lunatic arm movements and pontification to anyone who will listen.
Really, Penn is the only weak link in the cast, a minor miracle. Aside from terribly laughable southern accents (especially Hopkins, who sounds like the love child of "Star Trek"s Scotty and Bones), the acting isn´t the Achilles heel of "All the King´s Men". It´s all in the writing. Maybe it speaks to our current movie culture, but before Irwin´s BIG SECRET is outed, I expected something…seedier, dirtier. Maybe he molested a kid or three in the past. Maybe he committed some murders and pinned them on someone else. Maybe…he did ANYTHING that actually made sense in this story. Really, at this point, I wouldn´t have been surprised to learn Irwin was a Yankee spy for some Northern political organization. But alas it´s yet more convoluted political nonsense.
What else is there to say? Maybe just an observation about the final sequence of shots. I´m not giving too much away since this is an adaptation of a novel and a remake of a previous film. When Stark and Adam lay dead in the rotunda of the capital and their blood runs through the grooves in the state seal on the floor, both their streams come together and merge. I´m guessing this is some kind of heavy handed symbolism about people coming together from different walks of life, yadda yadda yadda. Honestly, I couldn´t care less by the end of the film. "All the King´s Men" is such an excruciatingly head scratching film considering the talent involved that the only thing left is a complete and unqualified 4 on the scale of 1 to 10. And that four is mainly attributed to the acting…by everyone but Penn.