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Trailer for "All the King's Men"

Near the end of Steven Zaillian’s new movie version of Robert Penn Warren’s famous novel All the King’s Men, the camera quickly pans down a wall in the Louisiana statehouse, past a relief image of Huey P. Long. The infamous but also idolized Louisiana governor and US senator in the 1930s was the unmistakable inspiration for Warren’s Willie Stark, the ball-of-fire, self-proclaimed champion of the downtrodden poor who climbs and schemes his way out of rural obscurity to the governor’s mansion. Promising to defend his wretchedly deprived supporters from the state’s oligarchy of oil and gas interests and the old landed elite, this dubious people’s tribune builds them roads, schools and hospitals, while aggrandizing himself politically and financially.

The fleeting glimpse of Long’s image is a little curious since Zaillian’s movie doesn’t have much to do with Long’s legend. This is by no means a fatal omission. The movie’s narrative confusion and inconsistent tone are much more serious flaws.

Sean Penn’s sometimes powerful but strained and uneven performance in the central role contributes to the film’s problems. His Stark is less a compelling human figure who looms over the characters’ lives than a studied, actorish construct. Penn is most effective in his quieter moments. Perhaps the movie’s best scene occurs early on, when Stark is invited to meet with a political boss, one Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini, seeming a little too greasy and obtuse), who wants to size up this apparently upright local public servant. Penn ably conveys cautious intelligence and the amiably modest persona he’s adopted as protection against an uncongenial world.

In fact, the movie’s first half-hour inspires some hope that it knows where it’s going. But that promise begins to dissipate about the time Stark wises up and turns on the political handlers who are manipulating and exploiting him in his run for governor. Penn’s performance inflates and becomes more mannered. It’s as if he’s more comfortable communicating insinuated cunning and mixed motives than unbridled, corrupt ambition and polemical force.

But the more serious failures, by far, are Zaillian’s. The basic material and his movie seem to have got away from him. He finished shooting in April of last year and there was a release scheduled for last December. Zaillian spent the considerable excess time in a reportedly meticulous effort to produce a successful cut. He jettisoned a lot of footage including, he says, the whole first reel. But the movie just doesn’t work.

An obvious part of the problem is that its story is told—much of the time in flashbacks—through the eyes and elegiacally windy voiceover narration of Jack Burden (Jude Law), a young, well-born journalist who becomes one of Stark’s henchmen despite, and also because, of his romantic ambivalence. Law is another kind of actor than Penn, one who relies on charm and irony; he doesn’t really enact introspective rue very well. And the story Burden is telling doesn’t really cohere. I don’t know if the missing footage held any answers, but in the movie’s present manifestation its script and editing don’t make things easy for us. Events seem telescoped and obscured. Several times an occurrence is referred to in passing without cluing us to what really transpired. There are several individual scenes that are brought off well, but as the film goes on, more that are carefully lit and handsomely photographed but too enervated and puzzling.

Anthony Hopkins, as a respected jurist and Burden’s father surrogate, seems a little becalmed in his role by the uncertain proceedings. Kate Winslet, as the golden girl Burden has longed for since he can remember (but can’t get because of his overrefined ambivalence), looks perplexed by her part.

At the very end, after that shot moves down the statehouse wall, the film resolves itself in a grandiosely gothic style filled with stilted emotion.

In 1949, Robert Rossen wrote and directed an adaptation of Warren’s novel that didn’t bother with most of the book’s recycled and altered history, or its ethical and political dilations, but which moved along with gathering melodramatic force. Zaillian’s movie winds up a ponderously ineffective mess.