TORONTO -- You would not immediately think of Sean Penn for the role of Willie Stark, the powerful and hugely ambitious Southern politician around whom Robert Penn Warren's famous 1946 novel revolves. You think of a Big Man because the character was modeled after Louisiana's flamboyant governor Huey P. Long and was played in the original 1949 movie by Broderick Crawford, both stocky men. But Penn fills the screen with this cagey and cunning character, his oratory so loquacious an enemy would vote for him and a body seeming to move in several different directions with every step. In one of his greatest screen performances, Penn nails the contradictory and compelling genius of a small-time rural pol, who dreams and schemes his way to the top of a corrupt system designed to keep men like him on the outside.
This charismatic performance, surrounded by incisive turns by an all-star ensemble cast, gives furious energy to a movie that doesn't seem to know how to contain it. Writer-director Steven Zaillian's questionable solution is to fit this rambunctious portrait of unruly Southern politics in a monumental frame where Southern Gothic meets Leni Riefenstahl. Neo-classical buildings and old-money mansions tower over mere mortals or glower with oligarchic rage. Ominous darkness reaches into the corners of a screen that is as close to black-and-white as a color movie can achieve. James Horner's music thunders so melodramatically you expect lightning to fill the sky at any moment.
Audience can certainly find entertainment in this movie, so long as no one takes things too seriously. One suspects, however, that Zaillian and a vast team of producers and executive producers that includes political consultant and pundit James Carville believe they are making a serious commentary on American politics. It comes closer to kitsch. Columbia Pictures will have a job selling a movie where drawbacks nearly equal winning attributes, and its great star has never meant much at the boxoffice.
Curiously, Zaillian moves the story from the 1930s to the postwar era, apparently to let Willie Stark deliver his common-man message to integrated audiences, making it seem as if Stark/Long reached out to poor blacks as well as poor whites. He certainly never did.
This particular type of demagogue grew out of a rural region in a Southern state dominated by cigar-smoking old-boy politics of the worst sort. To defeat such men, Willie had to use their own methods against them. Thus, the idealist often worked outside the law and believed the ends always justified any means. Penn, in even Willie's earliest moments as a hick politician in a backwater town, conveys this duality. He truly believes in the hopes and aspirations of his "fellow hicks," but know he can't deliver on his promise by playing fair.
Lapsed idealist and alcoholic journalist Jack Burden (Jude Law), the novel and movie's eyes and ears, picks up on this aspect of Willie right away. From Old Southern aristocracy himself, he gloms onto Willie as a breath of fresh air blowing through smoke-filled rooms. Jack joins Willie's administration after he is elected. But when the governor is threatened by impeachment, Willie asks Jack to dig up dirt on the prominent Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins), a man who acted as father to Jack between and during his mother's (Kathy Baker) four marriages.
His reluctant sleuthing proves everyone's undoing as Jack is forced to confront his own past, including his long lost love, the daughter of a former governor, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), and her melancholy brother Adam (Mark Ruffalo), the story's only true idealist. Meanwhile, Willis' press attache and sometime lover Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) jealously stirs the pot while Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini), a man of wide girth and low cunning, prods everyone with jabs of unimaginative pragmatism.
Subplots from the novel get shorn or abbreviated as the movie takes great leaps to get to its crucial moments. It can't afford too much subtlety, but then Willie is not a subtle guy. Nevertheless, the hammy neo-Third Reich trappings of the production design and cinematography feel disingenuous and imposed on a milieu and a political climate that produced a different kind of corruption. What you are left with then is a towering performance as Penn plays one of the great figures of 20th century American literature with a verve and vitality that is breathtaking.
This charismatic performance, surrounded by incisive turns by an all-star ensemble cast, gives furious energy to a movie that doesn't seem to know how to contain it. Writer-director Steven Zaillian's questionable solution is to fit this rambunctious portrait of unruly Southern politics in a monumental frame where Southern Gothic meets Leni Riefenstahl. Neo-classical buildings and old-money mansions tower over mere mortals or glower with oligarchic rage. Ominous darkness reaches into the corners of a screen that is as close to black-and-white as a color movie can achieve. James Horner's music thunders so melodramatically you expect lightning to fill the sky at any moment.
Audience can certainly find entertainment in this movie, so long as no one takes things too seriously. One suspects, however, that Zaillian and a vast team of producers and executive producers that includes political consultant and pundit James Carville believe they are making a serious commentary on American politics. It comes closer to kitsch. Columbia Pictures will have a job selling a movie where drawbacks nearly equal winning attributes, and its great star has never meant much at the boxoffice.
Curiously, Zaillian moves the story from the 1930s to the postwar era, apparently to let Willie Stark deliver his common-man message to integrated audiences, making it seem as if Stark/Long reached out to poor blacks as well as poor whites. He certainly never did.
This particular type of demagogue grew out of a rural region in a Southern state dominated by cigar-smoking old-boy politics of the worst sort. To defeat such men, Willie had to use their own methods against them. Thus, the idealist often worked outside the law and believed the ends always justified any means. Penn, in even Willie's earliest moments as a hick politician in a backwater town, conveys this duality. He truly believes in the hopes and aspirations of his "fellow hicks," but know he can't deliver on his promise by playing fair.
Lapsed idealist and alcoholic journalist Jack Burden (Jude Law), the novel and movie's eyes and ears, picks up on this aspect of Willie right away. From Old Southern aristocracy himself, he gloms onto Willie as a breath of fresh air blowing through smoke-filled rooms. Jack joins Willie's administration after he is elected. But when the governor is threatened by impeachment, Willie asks Jack to dig up dirt on the prominent Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins), a man who acted as father to Jack between and during his mother's (Kathy Baker) four marriages.
His reluctant sleuthing proves everyone's undoing as Jack is forced to confront his own past, including his long lost love, the daughter of a former governor, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), and her melancholy brother Adam (Mark Ruffalo), the story's only true idealist. Meanwhile, Willis' press attache and sometime lover Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) jealously stirs the pot while Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini), a man of wide girth and low cunning, prods everyone with jabs of unimaginative pragmatism.
Subplots from the novel get shorn or abbreviated as the movie takes great leaps to get to its crucial moments. It can't afford too much subtlety, but then Willie is not a subtle guy. Nevertheless, the hammy neo-Third Reich trappings of the production design and cinematography feel disingenuous and imposed on a milieu and a political climate that produced a different kind of corruption. What you are left with then is a towering performance as Penn plays one of the great figures of 20th century American literature with a verve and vitality that is breathtaking.
- 10/9/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This review was written for the festival screening of All the King's Men.
TORONTO -- You would not immediately think of Sean Penn for the role of Willie Stark, the powerful and hugely ambitious Southern politician around whom Robert Penn Warren's famous 1946 novel revolves. You think of a big man because the character was modeled after Louisiana's flamboyant governor Huey P. Long and was played in the original 1949 movie by Broderick Crawford, both stocky men. But Penn fills the screen with this cagey and cunning character, his oratory so loquacious an enemy would vote for him and a body seeming to move in several different directions with every step. In one of his greatest screen performances, Penn nails the contradictory and compelling genius of a small-time rural pol, who dreams and schemes his way to the top of a corrupt system designed to keep men like him on the outside.
This charismatic performance, surrounded by incisive turns by an all-star ensemble cast, gives furious energy to a movie that doesn't seem to know how to contain it. Writer-director Steven Zaillian's questionable solution is to fit this rambunctious portrait of unruly Southern politics in a monumental frame where Southern Gothic meets Leni Riefenstahl. Neo-classical buildings and old-money mansions tower over mere mortals or glower with oligarchic rage. Ominous darkness reaches into the corners of a screen that is as close to black-and-white as a color movie can achieve. James Horner's music thunders so melodramatically you expect lightning to fill the sky at any moment.
Audience can certainly find entertainment in this movie, so long as no one takes things too seriously. One suspects, however, that Zaillian and a vast team of producers and executive producers that includes political consultant and pundit James Carville believe they are making a serious commentary on American politics. It comes closer to kitsch. Columbia Pictures will have a job selling a movie where drawbacks nearly equal winning attributes, and its great star has never meant much at the boxoffice.
Curiously, Zaillian moves the story from the 1930s to the postwar era, apparently to let Willie Stark deliver his common-man message to integrated audiences, making it seem as if Stark/Long reached out to poor blacks as well as poor whites. He certainly never did.
This particular type of demagogue grew out of a rural region in a Southern state dominated by cigar-smoking old-boy politics of the worst sort. To defeat such men, Willie had to use their own methods against them. Thus, the idealist often worked outside the law and believed the ends always justified any means. Penn, in even Willie's earliest moments as a hick politician in a backwater town, conveys this duality. He truly believes in the hopes and aspirations of his "fellow hicks," but know he can't deliver on his promise by playing fair.
Lapsed idealist and alcoholic journalist Jack Burden (Jude Law), the novel and movie's eyes and ears, picks up on this aspect of Willie right away. From Old Southern aristocracy himself, he gloms onto Willie as a breath of fresh air blowing through smoke-filled rooms. Jack joins Willie's administration after he is elected. But when the governor is threatened by impeachment, Willie asks Jack to dig up dirt on the prominent Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins), a man who acted as father to Jack between and during his mother's (Kathy Baker) four marriages.
His reluctant sleuthing proves everyone's undoing as Jack is forced to confront his own past, including his long lost love, the daughter of a former governor, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), and her melancholy brother Adam (Mark Ruffalo), the story's only true idealist. Meanwhile, Willis' press attache and sometime lover Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) jealously stirs the pot while Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini), a man of wide girth and low cunning, prods everyone with jabs of unimaginative pragmatism.
Subplots from the novel get shorn or abbreviated as the movie takes great leaps to get to its crucial moments. It can't afford too much subtlety, but then Willie is not a subtle guy. Nevertheless, the hammy neo-Third Reich trappings of the production design and cinematography feel disingenuous and imposed on a milieu and a political climate that produced a different kind of corruption. What you are left with then is a towering performance as Penn plays one of the great figures of 20th century American literature with a verve and vitality that is breathtaking.
ALL THE KING'S MEN
Columbia Pictures in association with Relatively Media a Phoenix Pictures production
Writer/director: Steven Zaillian
Based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren
Producers: Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Ken Lemberger, Steven Zaillian
Executive producers: Todd Phillips, Andreas Schmid, Michael Hausman, David Thwaites, James Carville, Andy Grosch, Ryan Kavanaugh
Director of photography: Pawel Edelman
Production designer: Patrizia Von Brandenstein
Costumes: Marit Allen
Music: James Horner
Editor: Wayne Wahrman
Cast:
Willie Stark: Sean Penn
Jack Burden: Jude Law
Judge Irwin: Anthony Hopkins
Anne Stanton; Kate Winslet
Adam Stanton: Mark Ruffalo
Sadie Burke: Patricia Clarkson
Tiny Duffy: James Gandolfini
Sugar Boy: Jackie Earle Haley
Mrs. Burden: Kathy Baker
Running time -- 128 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
TORONTO -- You would not immediately think of Sean Penn for the role of Willie Stark, the powerful and hugely ambitious Southern politician around whom Robert Penn Warren's famous 1946 novel revolves. You think of a big man because the character was modeled after Louisiana's flamboyant governor Huey P. Long and was played in the original 1949 movie by Broderick Crawford, both stocky men. But Penn fills the screen with this cagey and cunning character, his oratory so loquacious an enemy would vote for him and a body seeming to move in several different directions with every step. In one of his greatest screen performances, Penn nails the contradictory and compelling genius of a small-time rural pol, who dreams and schemes his way to the top of a corrupt system designed to keep men like him on the outside.
This charismatic performance, surrounded by incisive turns by an all-star ensemble cast, gives furious energy to a movie that doesn't seem to know how to contain it. Writer-director Steven Zaillian's questionable solution is to fit this rambunctious portrait of unruly Southern politics in a monumental frame where Southern Gothic meets Leni Riefenstahl. Neo-classical buildings and old-money mansions tower over mere mortals or glower with oligarchic rage. Ominous darkness reaches into the corners of a screen that is as close to black-and-white as a color movie can achieve. James Horner's music thunders so melodramatically you expect lightning to fill the sky at any moment.
Audience can certainly find entertainment in this movie, so long as no one takes things too seriously. One suspects, however, that Zaillian and a vast team of producers and executive producers that includes political consultant and pundit James Carville believe they are making a serious commentary on American politics. It comes closer to kitsch. Columbia Pictures will have a job selling a movie where drawbacks nearly equal winning attributes, and its great star has never meant much at the boxoffice.
Curiously, Zaillian moves the story from the 1930s to the postwar era, apparently to let Willie Stark deliver his common-man message to integrated audiences, making it seem as if Stark/Long reached out to poor blacks as well as poor whites. He certainly never did.
This particular type of demagogue grew out of a rural region in a Southern state dominated by cigar-smoking old-boy politics of the worst sort. To defeat such men, Willie had to use their own methods against them. Thus, the idealist often worked outside the law and believed the ends always justified any means. Penn, in even Willie's earliest moments as a hick politician in a backwater town, conveys this duality. He truly believes in the hopes and aspirations of his "fellow hicks," but know he can't deliver on his promise by playing fair.
Lapsed idealist and alcoholic journalist Jack Burden (Jude Law), the novel and movie's eyes and ears, picks up on this aspect of Willie right away. From Old Southern aristocracy himself, he gloms onto Willie as a breath of fresh air blowing through smoke-filled rooms. Jack joins Willie's administration after he is elected. But when the governor is threatened by impeachment, Willie asks Jack to dig up dirt on the prominent Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins), a man who acted as father to Jack between and during his mother's (Kathy Baker) four marriages.
His reluctant sleuthing proves everyone's undoing as Jack is forced to confront his own past, including his long lost love, the daughter of a former governor, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), and her melancholy brother Adam (Mark Ruffalo), the story's only true idealist. Meanwhile, Willis' press attache and sometime lover Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) jealously stirs the pot while Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini), a man of wide girth and low cunning, prods everyone with jabs of unimaginative pragmatism.
Subplots from the novel get shorn or abbreviated as the movie takes great leaps to get to its crucial moments. It can't afford too much subtlety, but then Willie is not a subtle guy. Nevertheless, the hammy neo-Third Reich trappings of the production design and cinematography feel disingenuous and imposed on a milieu and a political climate that produced a different kind of corruption. What you are left with then is a towering performance as Penn plays one of the great figures of 20th century American literature with a verve and vitality that is breathtaking.
ALL THE KING'S MEN
Columbia Pictures in association with Relatively Media a Phoenix Pictures production
Writer/director: Steven Zaillian
Based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren
Producers: Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Ken Lemberger, Steven Zaillian
Executive producers: Todd Phillips, Andreas Schmid, Michael Hausman, David Thwaites, James Carville, Andy Grosch, Ryan Kavanaugh
Director of photography: Pawel Edelman
Production designer: Patrizia Von Brandenstein
Costumes: Marit Allen
Music: James Horner
Editor: Wayne Wahrman
Cast:
Willie Stark: Sean Penn
Jack Burden: Jude Law
Judge Irwin: Anthony Hopkins
Anne Stanton; Kate Winslet
Adam Stanton: Mark Ruffalo
Sadie Burke: Patricia Clarkson
Tiny Duffy: James Gandolfini
Sugar Boy: Jackie Earle Haley
Mrs. Burden: Kathy Baker
Running time -- 128 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
- 9/21/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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