All the King's Men

[Sonic Youth]

After only the second weekend of release, All the King's Men has dropped out of the box office top ten.

Wave bye to this footnote.

[Reza]

NY Times

September 26, 2006

When the Bad Buzz Arrives Before the Movie Does

By CARYN JAMES

The humiliating box office returns for “All the King’s Men” may have trickled in over the weekend (a pathetic $3.8 million), but the death knell sounded almost a year ago and unintentionally came out of its producers’ mouths. When Sony Pictures announced, just two months before the film’s planned Christmastime release, that its opening would be pushed into the next year, the official reason was that more time was needed to complete the editing and score. But the unmistakable message sent to savvy audiences (that means everyone now) was: This movie is in trouble.

The studio ignored one of the harshest realities of movie marketing today: It’s almost impossible to recover from bad buzz.

Studios wield their marketing campaigns as they always have, priming audiences to expect the best. But with the media following every twist of a movie’s progress, viewers head to theaters loaded with behind-the-scenes information. A current television spot for the Ashton Kutcher-Kevin Costner action film, “The Guardian” (opening Friday), actually flaunts its preview audience test scores, calling it “one of the best-playing and highest-scoring movies in the history of Touchstone Pictures.” Even insidery advertising campaigns, though, can’t change the fact that blogs, television infotainment and mainstream entertainment reporting can amount to an antimarketing campaign, priming audiences for the worst.

Such bad buzz isn’t fate; “Titanic” was famously postponed from summer to the holiday season of 1997. But that happened largely because the production was complicated, not because the movie was taken in for repairs. More important, in the near-decade since then, as the entertainment media have become ubiquitous, audiences have become more suspicious.

“They changed the date because they had a good film that they thought could be better yet,” one of the stars said about his delayed movie; that was Billy Bob Thornton on the 2004 fiasco “The Alamo.” So when the producers of “All the King’s Men” hinted that their postponement would simply make the film more competitive for the next Oscar race, moviegoers could only think, “Yeah, sure.”

Desperately trying to spin viewers with higher expectations, “All the King’s Men” set itself up for failure because it is impossible to forget a year’s worth of factoids. When Sean Penn first appears on screen in the film, as the self-described hick and soon-to-be-political-savant Willie Stark, his short-sided period haircut may jog your memory: that’s the funny haircut he had at the Oscars two years ago.

And when the idealistic Stark becomes Louisiana’s governor and, overnight it seems, is accused of graft and threatened with impeachment, it’s easy to speculate that the scenes charting his moral fall must have vanished during the months of heavy-duty editing. True or not, every flaw plays into the sense that there was big trouble behind the scenes.

And in the end, the studio sent another message of no confidence by opening “All the King’s Men” in September rather than during the prime Oscar-bait holiday season. Oscar-ready films that have opened in September, like “Mystic River” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” have come out of the prestigious New York Film Festival. “All the King’s Men” went to the nonexclusive Toronto film festival, and the word there was that the movie was mediocre at best. Mr. Penn appeared on “Larry King Live” a week before the film’s opening, but a picture is really troubled if its best resource is the Larry-loves-everything school of buzz.

A film would have to be extraordinarily good to overcome the weight of such negative scuttlebutt, which “All the King’s Men” is not. But it is not the nightmare its brutal critical and commercial death would suggest, either, and if it had arrived a year ago, its genuine strengths, piecemeal though they are, might have emerged more clearly.

Within the morass of the writer-director Steven Zaillian’s self-consciously arty overhead shots and James Horner’s excruciating, heavy-handed score (that’s what took an extra year?) is a still potent story of idealism, power and corruption. A year ago that might have made the film seem an intriguing disappointment, not a blight. Last year Jude Law’s sensitive performance as Jack Burden, a journalist who becomes Stark’s spineless aide, might have been better appreciated as the heartbreaking depiction of a man desperate to avoid the least implications of his emotions or actions.

It doesn’t help that most delayed movies, like “The Alamo,” really are turkeys. Last year’s troubled delayed films included Terry Gilliam’s leaden “Brothers Grimm” and the Jennifer Aniston dud “Rumor Has It.” No wonder audiences are suspicious when a good film arrives behind schedule. “Proof,” the eloquent adaptation of the Broadway play, with Gwyneth Paltrow as the grieving daughter of a mathematical genius, was caught in the changeover from Miramax to the Weinstein Company and dumped into theaters nearly a year later than expected. What chance did this lovely small film have?

Studios are learning to use the Internet and viral marketing to steer the buzz, but for now that approach is still better suited to movies that aim for a young audience (“Snakes on a Plane,” though even that failed to match its Web hype), not those with artistic ambitions. When films like “Proof” or “All the King’s Men” arrive late, they’re like the fish you order in a restaurant on Sunday. Sure, you can do it, and maybe it’ll be fine, but you’re prepared for that whiff that says it’s not quite fresh, the fishy smell of failure.

[Sonic Youth]

All The King’s Men


Allan Hunter in Toronto
Screendaily


Dir: Steven Zaillian. US. 2006. 125mins.

The queasy compromises of love, loyalty and bare knuckle politics are at the heart of a handsome, star-studded new version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All The King’s Men. The celebrated 1949 adaptation of the Robert Warren Penn epic is probably best remembered for Broderick Crawford’s Oscar-winning performance as the sweaty, blustering Southern demagogue inspired by Huey P Long.

But with this update, Steven Zaillian dilutes the power of such a fascinating creation by tilting the balance towards other figures in the story, fracturing the focus and undermining some of its potential resonance for contemporary viewers. The result is a talkative, well-heeled period drama that lacks the punch and meat of the original.

The proven pedigree of the piece and the quality of the cast should recommend it to upscale audiences but it seems unlikely to emulate the classic status of its post-war predecessor.

Reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in Hoffa, Sean Penn brings an actor’s relish to the barnstorming speeches and devilish charm of Willie Stark, a humble salesman swept into high office by the power of the ordinary electorate. A voice for the poor and downtrodden, he promises reforms in education, health and social services that place him at odds with the wealthy establishment in 1950s Louisiana.

He is a man who believes that the ends justify the means but his tragic slide into blackmail, corruption and sleaze is rather sidelined by the attention placed on his less fascinating aide-de-camp Jack Burden (Jude Law), a journalist from an aristocratic background.

When Burden is ordered to uncover any past scandals in the life of Stark’s nemesis Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins) he must confront the ghosts of his own past including former sweetheart Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet) and her reclusive brother Adam (Mark Ruffalo).

Lacking some of the sweep and scale that the material seems to demand, All The King’s Men is a rather stodgy, old-fashioned affair. It looks a treat with great care and attention lavished on the period detail and production design as events unfold in darkened rooms, shadowy automobiles and atmospheric swamplands.

Rather, the problem resides in a complex storyline that places too much emphasis on the conventional, conscience-stricken travails of Burden and consequently fails to make Stark the star of his own story. The approach robs the story of its true weight and a potentially shattering climax is drained of its emotional impact.

Jude Law and Sean Penn deliver the star turns here but aspects of Penn’s Willie Stark are left frustratingly unexplored in a film that doesn’t entirely deliver on its promise. Of the support, Kate Winslet has little to do, while Anthony Hopkins is fine so far as he goes but again fields a fairly limited role.

[Reza]

So it's finally confirmed that the film and the large cast are not going to be anywhere near the podium come Oscar night. Another film to cross off lists.

[Sonic Youth]

All the King's Men

By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter

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.

[Sonic Youth]

All the King's Men


By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety

Overstuffed and fatally miscast, "All the King's Men" never comes to life. Despite location shooting and obvious sincerity, this second screen version of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1946 novel about a corrupt populist Southern governor not unlike Louisiana's Huey P. Long doesn't seem authentic for a moment, due to a glittering array of actors who look and sound like they've come from different ends of the English-speaking world -- which, in fact, they have. Absent any point of engagement to become involved in the characters, the film feels stillborn and is unlikely to stir public excitement, even in an election year.

Willie Stark (like Long) came as close to demonstrating the possibilities of a uniquely American fascism as any politician. The source of his power was Southern hicks, the poor, the disenfranchised, the resentful have-nothings on whose behalf Stark promised, if elected, to stick a pole through the rich ol' boys and cook 'em over an open pit.

Given some of their past projects and involvements, there's no doubt it's this almost always pertinent political component that inspired project originator James Carville, producer Mike Medavoy and writer-director Steve Zaillian to want to remake a film that won the Oscar for best picture; indeed, it's the only reason there could be to get excited about such a venture.

All the greater the disappointment, then, that this long-delayed production bears scarcely a pulse, much less the passion of its characters and filmmakers behind it. Even the period seems uncertain: The story unquestionably belongs to the Depression era, when Long himself reigned. But the cars and a few other details look somewhat more recent, and one is astonished to learn at the end that the story has run all the way up to 1954. No doubt the rationale was to make the story seem less distant, and thus somehow more relevant, but the move does nothing but underline the film's imprecision and incredibility.

Stark, played with untiring ferociousness and ceaseless arm-waving and gesticulating by Sean Penn, is the poor farm boy and political small-timer paged by monied operator Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini) to run for governor in a covert attempt to split the redneck vote and thus hand the election to the fat-cat incumbent. When Willie discovers this, his rage incites him to discover his true voice as an orator, publicly attacking Duffy along with all the other back-scratching Baton Rouge bigwigs.

The from-one-hick-to-another approach works wonders, and it's here, where Willie establishes his rapport with the people, that the film should soar. But we never see Willie mixing it up with the hoi polloi in any meaningful way, as Zaillian simply offers standard-issue reaction shots of unknown extras giving Willie the thumbs-up without, frankly, the kind of hee-hawing and "You tell 'em, Willie!" responses you'd expect to see.

Even before it gets this far, however, the film bogs down in the hushed, lugubrious narration of disillusioned newspaperman Jack Burden, who has gone on to work for Willie and is clearly fated to be buried along with his bottle of booze.

Three of the seven leading roles are played by British actors; of them, Law is the only one to even attempt a Southern accent (strange, in that the Brits, beginning with Vivien Leigh, used to be so good at it). But he then chooses to speak as quietly as possible, in the likely hope that the inadequacies of his accent will be all but indecipherable.

As to the others, Kate Winslet, as the unconsummated love of Jack's youth, speaks plain old American, while Anthony Hopkins, playing a powerful judge in what could be called the Burl Ives or Charles Durning role, sounds as though he's from Louisiana by way of Wales and London.

To fit with Winslet, who plays his sister, Mark Ruffalo goes easy on the Southernisms as well. As for Gandolfini, well, you can take Tony Soprano outta Joisey but you can't take the Joisey outta Tony Soprano. Overall, high school productions of "Li'l Abner" make more concerted stabs at down-home authenticity than this picture does.

Shorn of the vitality and vulgarity that should course through the veins of any picture about politicians and newspapermen, especially in the setting and time in question, this "All the King's Men" plays out solemnly along the lines of a Greek tragedy, as Willie Stark becomes the epitome of the sort of power-hording, fear-inspiring, special-interests-favoring, thoroughly corrupt blowhard he had once attacked. This is supposed to be a cautionary tale about populism run amok, but it doesn't put the chill in you because the film never connects to real life.

Once Willie is installed in the governor's office, the pic tries to stir interest in a scam concerning the construction of a medical center that implicates Ruffalo's earnest young medic, whose sister, Jack's long-ago love, is having a secret affair with Willie. Climactic stretch involves Willie's attempt to avoid impeachment by forcing the ever-loyal Jack to dig up dirt on Hopkins' Judge Irwin, an old-school gent unalterably opposed to the governor's seamy ways.

Denouement is impressive for having been staged at the '30s deco-style Louisiana State Capitol building that Huey Long built and where he was later assassinated. But the sequence becomes protracted and pretentious in its treatment.

The film is luxurious to a fault where it should have been dirty, sweaty and gritty. One rarely even feels Louisiana's sticky heat through the cool blues, grays and greens of lenser Pawel Edelman's palette. James Horner's full-blown mournful score further emphasizes the project's grandiose proportions.