"All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1946 novel about the rise and fall of a demagogic Southern... (more)

"All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1946 novel about the rise and fall of a demagogic Southern governor, may be a classic, but it is far from perfect. Warren’s book, a meaty stew of lurid Southern-gothic pulp and high-minded literariness, seems to provide the recipe for a grand, melodramatic prestige picture, the kind that can both flatter and titillate the audience (and the Academy) while providing at least a half-dozen actors the opportunity to thunder, strut, pine and wail. Lust, power, greed, betrayal, family secrets, dark sedans and crumbling plantation houses, a tremor of illicit sex and a glimmer of political relevance: “All the King’s Men” has it all. The problem may be that it has too much. The director Steve Zaillian and his editor, Wayne Wahrman, having labored mightily to strain and reduce Warren’s messy gumbo, serve up a platter heaped with starchy, indigestible lumps. A squad of blue-chip performers — including Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins and Patricia Clarkson — sweat handsomely in their Depression-era clothes, illuminated by sunlight slanting exquisitely into dark-paneled rooms and smoky train compartments, while James Horner’s score blasts significance into every corner of the frame. But nothing in the picture works.  (close)