Political Cartoon

Hot-air buffoon: Sean Penn (over)plays southern politician Willie Stark in Steven Zaillian's film All the King's Men. (Columbia Pictures)

You know that old adage about an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare? OK, now put together half a dozen Oscar-pedigreed actors, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and a filmmaking budget four times the size of Canada’s debt. What do you get? You get All the King’s Men. But here’s the funny part: it still smells like monkey crap.

All the King’s Men, based on Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel, is a disaster, though not a particularly fabulous one. There is little pleasure in the film’s badness, just alarm and wonder at how very wrong a film can go. Here is a movie that announces the import of every closed door with a booming bass drum. But on the other side of that door… nothing. The film is an allegory without a reason, a bid for universalism without any specificity. It is a hard-blowing blowhard.

Resuscitating Warren’s novel and the beloved, Oscar-winning 1949 film adaptation was the brainchild of Clinton-era Democrat James Carville, who saw, not incorrectly, something of pressing relevance in this story of the rise and fall of an outsider politician. Sean Penn plays Willie Stark, a Louisiana blue-collar Everyman whose identification with “the hicks” leads him to the governor’s seat. Penn can be a fantastic actor, but he is flailing here — literally. His linguine arms wave as he rants at the faceless masses about the “fat cat” politicians who don’t understand the earth-tilling ways of the average voter. Penn, always Method, appears to have had the joints removed from his jaw; his mouth flaps almost as much as his wild sprig of hair. All this bodily busy-ness distracts from what he’s saying, which is fine, because the accent is so unmoored that it’s impossible to understand him anyway. This is not Mystic River Sean Penn; this is I Am Sam Sean Penn, mechanically working the tics and mannerisms, leaving his humanity behind.

In a world neatly divided into “hicks” and “fat cats,” Stark is supposed to be a hero who bridges the divide. Thus, it might have behooved writer-director Steven Zaillian to show, even briefly, the people Stark is purportedly representing. But the country folk remain a lumpen horde, never individuated, just silently nodding their assent at their alleged hero’s speechifying. How can Stark be the people’s voice if they don’t have one to begin with?

The game of book-film compare-and-contrast is always best avoided, but it’s impossible to ignore the egregious error that Zaillian makes in moving the setting from the Great Depression to the 1950s. Even the South tasted some postwar prosperity, but in Zaillian’s version, the ’50s are still dust-bowl days, replete with socket-eyed children and drought-pocked fields; it’s Cinderella Man with dry heat. Since the film can’t shake the original setting, one is constantly speculating as to why Zaillian switched it up. Spying the face of a black man in the crowd as Sean Penn windmills across the stage at a rally, I thought: Ah-ha, we’re going to see Louisiana on the edge of the civil rights movement and the bass drum will get to justify its existence! But no: the drum bangs pompously on. Yet in a film about a man who stands up for poor southerners in the 1950s, there is not one black character of note.

Close encounter: Reporter Jack Burden (Jude Law) falls for his childhood friend, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), in All the King's Men. (Columbia Pictures)

Instead, Zaillian drops us down into a silly noir with Kate Winslet as an unlikely femme fatale socialite and Jude Law as her childhood friend Jack Burden, a cynical reporter who becomes a Stark lackey. Anthony Hopkins plays a judge who is also Burden’s godfather; the actor seems determined to barely weigh in on this fiasco. Hopkins’s total lack of investment brings to mind a torture victim enduring the trauma by leaving his body through silent repetition (“I’m not here, I’m somewhere else. I’m not here, I’m somewhere else”). From behind glaucoma-sticky eyes, the Louisiana judge lectures his godson about morality, etc., in an unexplained full-on British accent. Neither Law nor Winslet exactly pass as Acadians, either, but at least there’s a sense that they bothered to squeeze in five (Law) or six (Winslet) meetings with a vocal coach. Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo — who is American, for God’s sake, and another wonderful actor — pops up, yammering in some invented southern dialect (South Oscarina? New Academeans?). He plays a near-mute doctor who lives like Blanche Dubois in one of those apartments with dusty lace curtains and an old piano — for no particular reason.

Penn herks and jerks until suddenly, inexplicably, everyone around him is referring to “Guvnah Stahk’s” strong-arm tactics and the “terr’bl” path of corruption he’s on. And yet, we never see these heinous acts — nor, really, their consequences. This is a film with absolutely no narrative arc. That’s fine if you’re Gus Van Sant, but a politician’s fall hardly matters if there was never any glory in the ascent.

Warren’s book was loosely based on the life of Huey P. Long, the alternately adored and feared Louisiana governor who might have made it to the White House. Like Long’s life, Zaillian’s version of All the King’s Men is meant to speak to the inherent treachery of the political realm, to derive a big-picture lesson from the small picture of a good man dancing with the devil. But in this sorry adaptation, that picture — despite the expensive cinematography and the beautiful faces of a camera-loves-us cast — is blurry and ultimately incoherent. The unholy marriage of Hollywood and Washington may serve the award-mongering tendencies of big-name stars, but the people, once again, will be sorely disappointed.

All the King’s Men opens Sept. 21 across Canada.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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