All The King's Men (Blu-ray)

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"All the King's Men" is possibly the worst film adaptation of a literary novel since "The Great Gatsby." People who watch this confused muddle about a southern politician's rise and fall will wonder how it was possible that the novel of the same title by Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947. The answer is simple: the writing was strong, and the economical, almost fabulistic plot was absolutely evocative of Huey Long, the real Louisiana politician upon which it was based. As with "The Great Gatsby," Penn Warren's novel was also as much about its narrator as it was about its dubious hero. There were layers of complexities that just don't translate to this film.

But Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson? You look at the stars in this film and you can't help but wonder how it could possibly have failed. Well, it's the screenplay and direction from Steven Zaillian that dooms the picture. Willie Stark (Penn) goes from being a door-to-door salesman to protesting the oil companies' unfair labor practices to winning the governorship faster than any of it can make sense. Though the camera movement itself isn't jerky, the scenes jump so quickly from here to there that the whole thing feels like the work of an amateur using a hand-held camera. We never actually get much of a sense of Stark being governor, and while the Long-style populist rants defined the governor's personality, way too much time is given to Penn's folksy shout-fests and not enough is spent developing the characters or fleshing out the logistics of the plot.

Speaking of which, let's talk about logic for a moment. "All the King's Men" was first brought to the big screen in 1949, earning a Best Actor Oscar for Broderick Crawford and a Best Picture statue for director Robert Rossen, who used action veteran Don Siegel to direct political campaign montages to conserve narrative time. It was a brilliant film that captured the essence of the story that Penn Warren wanted to tell, and so it makes absolutely no sense to me that anyone would attempt a remake of a film that managed to get it right the first time. What's next on the remake schedule? "Casablanca"?

In this version, one minute we're feeling like we're in the middle of a leisurely-but-dark relationship film ala "The Talented Mr. Ripley," while the next minute we're in the car (again) with Stark's bodyguard Sugar Boy (Jackie Earle Haley) feeling something sinister and foreboding. Then there are the almost comical moments when Stark and political boss Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini) are onscreen together. I'm not from the South, but if I found Penn's and Gandolfini's performances to be borderline caricatures, I'm guessing that people who are from the South found it REALLY annoying or really hilarious. Neither one of them was convincing as a southerner--especially Gandolfini, who still seemed to sport traces of the New Jersey accent we're accustomed to hearing from him in "The Sopranos."