For more movie summaries, see Kam's Kapsules.
(Photo by Kerry Hayes. © Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved.)
FINDING HIS STRIDE: Gubernatorial candidate Willie Stark (Sean Penn, left) successfully revises his campaign strategy after discovering that his crooked campaign manager had been undermining Stark's election campaign. |
It takes nerve to remake a movie which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), and Best Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge). Yet that's exactly what we have with All the King's Men (1949) which Columbia decided to remake in an attempt to improve upon the older version.
Both films are based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name describing the rise and fall of Willie Stark, a populist politician, hailing from humble roots, who falls prey to the same crookedness and cronyism he had campaigned against. Stark's political machine and career trajectory closely mirrors that of Louisiana Governor/U.S. Senator Huey Long, a charismatic figure from the thirties who captured the people's imagination with fiery speeches about redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.
The original film was very convincing in portraying the transformation of a naive idealist into a ruthless crook, however, the new version is a fatuous, self-important period piece. It's a complex saga exploring themes such as power and corruption, love and betrayal, blackmail and coercion, and sin and redemption. This pretentious movie devotes more attention to recreating the ambiance of a bygone era than to addressing the moral questions it raises.
The film was directed by Steven Zaillian who has reinterpreted the source material as a highly-stylized neo-noir movie. Regrettably, Zaillian failed to coax dynamic performances or decent Southern accents out of the stellar cast comprised of Sean Penn, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Patricia Clarkson, James Gandolfini, and Mark Ruffalo. The result is an emotionally disengaging, albeit visually captivating, experience of little salutary effect.
The story unfolds in the fifties where we first find Stark (Penn), a teetotaler and family man, on the campaign trail for governor of Louisiana. A novice, he's unaware that he's being managed by a shady operator (Gandolfini) who is trying to split the vote, not to win the election for Stark. He quickly realizes what's happening, however, and replaces the backstabber with a reporter (Law), tears up his stump speech, and starts speaking to crowds straight from the heart.
The honest approach works and he wins in a landslide. However, he almost immediately begins to adopt all the graft taking, influence peddling, boozing, and womanizing ways of the previous administration, the point being that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Simultaneously, the governor becomes embroiled in several subplots which involve a crooked judge (Hopkins), a femme fatale (Winslet), and her strait-laced brother (Ruffalo).
However, since every character is a shallow caricature of a familiar archetype, don't expect much from this two hour borefest.
Fair (1 star). Rated PG-13 for sex, epithets, ethnic slurs, violence, and partial nudity. Running time: 120 minutes. Studio: Columbia Pictures.
For more movie summaries, see Kam's Kapsules.