>>REVIEW
ALL THE KING’S MEN
STARRING Sean Penn, Jude Law and Kate Winslet
DIRECTED BY Steve Zaillian
Now playing
Check listings
The political corruption of populist idealism isn’t exactly a new theme in cinema (or in politics, for that matter), and one might wonder how it warrants further exploration in a time when idealism is scarce and "political corruption" is a redundancy at best.
Then again, maybe that’s just cynical, and maybe this sort of cynicism is precisely the reason why Sean Penn is presently stumping like a mofo for the populist vote as the fictional Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, a film based on the 1947 novel by Robert Penn Warren that, despite Warren’s protestations to the contrary, would seem to have been in turn based at least in part on the rise to power and assassination of populist Depression-era Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long.
I would be most curious to see how the film plays in Alberta, a jurisdiction where its concerns might still somehow resonate in unusual ways. Long’s story is a fascinating one, and in its populism bears more than a few similarities to that of Alberta’s erstwhile premier, despite the fact that Long made perhaps his biggest mark trying to increase taxes on oil companies while Ralph Klein is better known for, well, quite the opposite. Another way to put it would be that Long was a genuine populist while Klein just pretended to be.
OK, so Stark is not Long, much less Klein, but if his story is of any relevance in these times, it deserves a better telling than it receives in this film. It might be found in Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel or the Oscar-winning 1949 film of the same name (starring Broderick Crawford as Stark). Meanwhile, Long himself was chronicled in a Ken Burns documentary and in two TV mini-series based on his bizarre political career, and we wait for those lickspittles at the CBC to turn their newfound enthusiasm for Alberta into a Klein biopic movie of the week.
Until then, we’ve got Penn acting his ass off, throwing apoplectic fits and screaming slogans like "Ain’t nobody ever helped a hick but a hick hisself!" Impressive? Yes, but it’s all for naught unless, in the process, he also manages to convey the film’s tragedy, which is… what, exactly? That power and, moreover, ambition can corrupt even, or perhaps especially, the most idealistic among us? Yeah, newsflash. So, if it’s not that, is it a call to arms, or at least to the polls, for (American) voters to rise as one and transcend the boundaries of class the way Long did back in 1928? Hmmm… even all the overt symbolism, swelling strings on the soundtrack, and Penn’s overcooked ham don’t quite lead to that conclusion. Perhaps at best All the King’s Men is just Penn’s way of appealing to voters of a different kind – the ones who cast their ballots each February at the Oscars. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.