Zaillian made his film by borrowing novelistic devices from Warren’s story. It was interesting to read critical complaints about these devices—subplots, baroque language, jumps between past and present, voiceover—when in fact these devices were so fundamental to the novel. Zaillian makes extensive use of voiceover, always narrated by the character Jack Burden as portrayed by Jude Law. Often voiceover scenes begin with a view of Jack Burden tossing and turning on his bed, presumably mulling over in his mind the events he is talking about. Often voiceover in the film cues us into a transition back to the past (as to remembered scenes on the beach of Burden’s Landing) or forward to the present or to another geographical location. All the King’s Men in a sense is an interior monologue that takes place within Jack Burden’s mind. He narrates the novel, and the course of his thinking determines the direction of his narration. (Of course, Warren’s decisions as author truly determine the narrative’s direction). Critics complained of how the film jumped around from present to past and back again, but this struck me as a logical and useful way for the film to tell its story, especially given that the film and novel are about the interrelationships of past and present.
Jack Burden’s voiceover narration of the film calls attention to his own role in the events he describes. In the 1949 Robert Rossen All the King’s Men, there is no voiceover narration, and none is needed, since Burden in that film is mainly a secondary character. Broderick Crawford’s Willie Stark was the central character. In Zaillian’s remake, as in Warren’s novel, Burden is one of two main characters. And he is the only character trying to come to terms with the events he narrates--the only character who bears the burden of his own past and who to some extent finds that past inextricably tied up with events of the present time in the film.
In the concluding pages of the novel, Jack Burden comments that in telling the story of Willie Stark he is telling his own story. This is a crucial element of the novel. Zaillian replicates the parallelism between Stark and Burden in his film. The film traces the arc of Stark’s career, of the complicating events that end in assassination. Unfortunately, he does not include events that follow Willie’s death, in particular events involving Jack Burden. By ending with Willie’s death, Zaillian fails to complete the story he set out to tell, so that the film feels incomplete.
The voiceover allows Zaillian to include in the film much of the actual language of the novel. Warren was at his best as a poet in All the King’s Men—even though he was writing a novel—the language is one of the most remarkable and notable elements of the novel, and Zaillian’s decision to use much of that language invests the film with a deep philosophical tone and character that I particularly liked.
Zaillian also preserved certain crucial dramatic moments from the novel—for instance, Jack Burden’s first meeting with Willie, Jack’s uncompleted tryst with Anne Stanton, the scream he hears from his mother on the evening of Judge Irwin’s suicide, and most of the details of the Mortimer Littlepaugh scandal. Although Zaillian preserves Sadie Burke’s speech to Stark about how he has been used by Tiny Duffy and others, and Willie’s subsequent dramatic speech to the people at the fair about how they are all hicks, he downplays these scenes. Willie does not seem to be drunk in Zaillian’ film, and the speech itself, though powerfully delivered by Sean Penn, lacks the drama of the speech in the novel and as delivered by Broderick Crawford in the Rossen film.
Finally, Zaillian makes clear that the novel he is adapting is set in the deep South. In fact, he goes further than Warren went by making the state in which events occur Louisiana. Warren keeps the identity of the state unnamed, and most of the cities he mentions—Mason City, Capital City, are generic. I don’t have a problem with Zaillian’s explicitness—we all knew what state Warren really had in mind to begin with, so what does it matter? Rossen removed his story from the South. Most of his characters did not speak with Southern accents, and there was little way to identify his story as a Southern story unless one had read the book on which it was based. Rossen’s concern was in telling a parable about the possibility of fascism in America. He used Warren’s novel and certain broad elements of its plot to address his own themes.
Zaillian started out with the quite different intention of adapting the novel and of retaining its basic tones, scenes, characters, and themes. And he decides to be explicit about the name of the state where the events occur. One pitfall of doing this is that one is more prone to connect Stark with Huey Long. To avoid the linkage Zaillian sets his novel in the 1950s, long after Huey Long was alive (and at the end of the Southern demagogue era). The novel All the King’s Men is a Depression narrative. It’s difficult to think of it in other terms, and in fact by appealing to the common farmer’s own economic problems and suffering, Stark is able to build much of his power-base. He rises to power, in part, by offering sympathy and rescue to those people most suffering from the Depression. Many of the people who listen to Stark’ speeches in the Zaillian remake look like they’re suffering from the Depression, but in fact this cannot be so. Maybe they’re simply suffering.
Setting the film in the 1950s perhaps allows Zaillian to make one more adjustment: many of the people who listen to Willie and are moved by his words are African American. In the 1930s black Southerners cannot vote, and probably would not be standing in the middle of a mostly white crowd at a political rally. In Zaillian’s version of the 1950s, black people attend political rallies and do, presumably, vote. This is not historically accurate. In the real 1950s of Louisiana and the rest of the Deep South, black people may have listened to and thought about political speeches, but they could not for the most part vote.
Clearly Zaillian made some questionable decisions in his making of the film. Primary among them are casting decisions. One can find fault in particular with the three main leads: Sean Penn as Willie Stark, Jude Law as Jack Burden, Kate Winslet as Anne Stanton. These are three fine actors, but they may not have been right for these roles. Some reviewers suggested that James Gandolfini (who plays Tiny Duffy in the film) would have worked better as Willie. I don’t think so. First of all, Gandolfini is too clearly entrenched in middle age. He is large and fleshy, and though Willie had undoubtedly attained those proportions to some extent by the time he ran for a second term as governor, Gandolfini could not have portrayed Willie as a younger man. Penn, not a fleshy person, appears in the film to be generic in age. He doesn’t look much older as governor that he does as a first-time political candidate in the film. He is also a better actor than Gandolfini, and thus potentially capable of portraying Willie Stark more effectively. Whatever one may think of Sean Penn or of the casting decision that placed him in this role, he offers a credible and reasonable interpretation of Willie Stark, an alternative perhaps to the one offered by Broderick Crawford, and perhaps even to the one given by Warren in the novel, but at least a reasonable interpretation. It worked for me, especially given the fact that Sean Penn’s Willie Stark was not intended to be the sole center of the film.
The film insisted on too many close-ups of Sean Penn while he is giving speeches. Penn presented an unusual and credible speaking style in which Willie Stark gestures with his entire body, not just with a raised arm or overturned hand. This is again not the Willy Stark I would have imagined, but it is ultimately one in which I was willing to believe. But more scenes shot from a distance, that showed Willie speaking to a crowd, that showed Willie and the crowd together and did not insist on the close-up shots which became distracting if not in some way narcissistic, would have contributed more effectively to the theme of power, democracy, and leadership in the film.
Once again, although Jude Law did not initially strike me as the right choice to play Jack Burden, he comported himself adequately. Burden’s character strikes me as older than Law, more bitter and hard-bitten, more sardonic and inclined towards satiric humor. Law came across as humorless and sometimes emotionless. We know he felt emotions mainly because he told us he did in the voiceovers. Yet it is Jude Law’s narration as Jack Burden that binds the film together and is the heart of the themes and interwoven plots that in fact are what the film is about. Ultimately, I thought Jude Law was effective as Jack Burden, in part because so much of Warren’s original language remained in his voiceover narration.
Finally, there is Kate Winslet. Her wig was false. She mainly had to look fetching, to give occasional bewitching or entrancing or mysterious or come hither glances. She was beautiful, as Anne Stanton was said to be, but she seemed wholly wrong for the part. Yet she is a fine actress, and she occupied the role in her own way and succeeded with it. As a character of primary importance to Jack, but who in the novel and film was really only a secondary character, Winslet’s role neither helped nor hindered the effort.
The film does have weaknesses, some of them significant. I noticed in the last third it began to drag and seemed to lose focus. Certain scenes seem “telegraphed,” as if the director assumed that the viewer had read the novel and therefore would recognize and register particular scenes so that full development was unnecessary. One of these was the scene involving the father of the girl who is seriously injured in the car crash with Willie’s son Tom. Another is Tom himself. The novel develops a subplot involving Tom and his difficult relationship with his father develops. Tom is brash and arrogant and, like most teenagers, considers himself immortal. When he is severely injured in a football game following the car accident—paralyzed, in fact, an injury from which he later dies—a series of events is triggered that leads Willie to relinquish his corrupt ways, to declare the hospital he is building off-limits to political deals, and which in turn leads Tiny Duffy to suggest to Sadie Burke who is mad about Willie’s affair with Anne Stanton to tell Adam that . . . and so on. But there is no need for Tom in the film. Zaillian’s script removes any reference to a chain of events set in motion by the car crash. Tom is there merely as a kind of acknowledgement of his place in the novel. He could have been omitted entirely, with no damage to the film. As it is in the film, what sets the chain of events in motion is Sadie Burke’s jealousy of Anne Stanton, a motivation that in and of itself seems inadequate.
Another weakness in the film is the absence of humor. The language of the novel is full of tough-guy sardonic humor, mostly utterances from Jack but also from other people in the story, especially Willy and his cronies. The humor of the novel is an expression of Jack’s personality, and also of his disillusionment. It is also an expression of the language itself. Although we encounter hints of that humor in the voiceover narration, for the most part the film is a somber, serious, sometimes lugubrious affair.
The film also engages in some oversimplifications of events. I’ve already mentioned one—events that lead to Willie’s assassination are elided and abridged, and Jack’s tangential involvement in them is missing entirely. The early rise of Willie Stark to political power is also simplified—when Willie in the film discovers that he has been played as the sap, he goes on the offensive and manages to win the gubernatorial election in a landslide, while in the novel Willie joins the Harrison campaign, lobbies for his election, and in another four years he runs again on his own, that time in a winning effort. That particular abridgement does not strike me as a serious lapse—it’s the kind of abbreviation that film adaptations by necessity engage in. A much more important sequence of scenes involving the scandal of Judge Irwin and Mortimer Littlepaugh are not for the most part abridged, and thus their crucial role in the narrative is retained. Another example of abbreviation is the early relationship of Jack Burden and Anne Stanton. In the novel, Jack’s early idealization of and love for Anne Stanton is at the center of his problem. His image of Anne diving off the float into the water and floating there in the water as the storm looms is partially alluded to in the film, but it lacks the importance it holds in the novel.
Of course, some scenes are missing entirely: I will mention two at this point. The film entirely omits the portion of the narrative that describes Jack’s life as a graduate student in history, his dissertation on his ancestor Cass Mastern, and his marriage to the lubricious Lois. The Mastern episode is a crucial episode in the novel. William Faulkner claimed it was the only part of the novel he liked. The Cass Mastern episode details the experiences of an ancestor of Jack’s who betrays his best friend and sleeps with his wife. The consequences include his friend’s suicide and the selling down the river by Annabelle Trice of the slave Phoebe, who is aware of the affair. Cass fells deep guilt for his involvement in his friend’s death and the selling of the slave, and for the rest of his life he takes steps to try to expiate the crimes he feels responsibility for. Cass is the person Jack could not bring himself to be. He is the example Jack could not live up to, and thus the presence of the episode in the novel sets up a parallelism between past and present, between Cass Mastern and Jack Burden, on which Warren weaves his spider web image and on which he bases further explorations of Jack’s character and the novel’s themes. I had hoped this episode would be in the film, but I did not expect it to be. As much as I like and appreciate the episode, and as much as it serves to illustrate and intensify the themes of the novel, those themes are already in the text. They remain there when the episode disappears. They’re not crucial to the investigations in which the novel and the film engage. I would say the same for the film’s omission of Jack’s father the scholarly attorney and for the virtuous character of Hugh Miller.,
The most serious flaw in the film is the absence of any narrative following Willie Stark’s death. In the novel, Willie hangs on for several days after the shooting before expiring. In both film adaptations, he dies right there on the floor of the capitol rotunda, next to Adam. In the 1949 adaptation this was a suitable ending, because that film was about Willie. But the 2006 film is about Willie and Jack, perhaps more about Jack than Willie. The film carefully builds the relationship and the parallels between Willie and Jack. It traces the development (albeit in abbreviated form) of the relationship of Jack with Adam and Anne, especially the latter, in their idyllic childhood days at Burden’s Landing. It shows how Jack becomes involved in the political world of Willie Stark and how to an extent he becomes part of that world—manipulative and corrupt. Finally, the film deftly traces how Willie is able to manipulate Jack into finding the dirt on the man whom Jack most admires and respects—Judge Irwin, the man who of course turns out to be his father.
What the film leaves out is Jack’s tenuous and unwitting involvement in the events that lead to the assassination. It also leaves out the after-story, that part of the novel in which Jack comes to realize his own complicity in the events. By this he is able, after a fashion, to recover from his guilt, to take responsibility for himself, and to have the possibility of a life with Anne Stanton, who at the end of the novel he has married.
As I say, at the end of the novel, Jack and Anne Stanton are married and are planning to leave Burden’s Landing and go out into the world of time and memory and whatever else the hell it is. The point here is that the events in which they’ve been involved have allowed them to learn how to live in the real world, a world of corruption and guilt and sin but also of virtues and ideals. This is also the post-World War II world. The entirety of the novel takes place and comes to an end prior to the beginning of the second world war. When Jack and Anne go out into the world it is the world of that second world war and all that it entails—death, horrific battles, nuclear bombs, the holocaust. That is the world they have learned to live in, that they have chosen to live in.
By omitting the after story and by moving the time of the film to the 1950s, Zaillian effectively removes this entire dimension of the narrative and also denies himself a way to conclude the story of Jack Burden. Willie dies and his story is over. But Jack’s story continues. And that continuation is a crucial point of the novel. Zaillian’s failure to complete the Jack Burden story, when he completed the Willie Stark story, means that he is unable to complete the story as a whole. After two hours and however many minutes, the film ends, yet it is not really finished.
My complaints about various episodes the film has omitted or abbreviated do not take into account the limitations that filmmakers face, and that novelists do not face. Most films have to end after two hours or at most two-and-a-half hours. The films that do not end within this span of time are more than likely going to fail commercially if not also artistically. Zaillian undertook the adaptation of a long novel and apparently set as one of his goals the preservation of important characters and scenes and tones from the novel. Trying to accomplish that goal within a two-hour span was simply an insurmountable task. This may explain in part why the film was delayed for a year after the initial announcement of its release in the second half of 2005. Zaillian apparently spent the next year editing and re-editing the film, trying to make it work. (Hurricane Katrina, which struck in August 2005 and devastated much of the state the film is about, may also have played a role in the delay.) Had funds been unlimited, or at least in greater abundance, and had I been asked, I would have advised Zaillian to allow the film to run another hour, which could have given him time to complete the Jack Burden plot, and perhaps to flesh out some of the other scenes. In particular, I would have reconceived and reshot the entire episode involving Willie’s discovery that he has been played for a sap and the speech in which he speaks to the hicks for the first time. The result might not have become a commercial success, but might have been more successful as an adaptation, and as a work of art.
Let me state for the record: I enjoyed this film and appreciated its attempt to make a fairly close adaptation of the novel. It preserved much of the novel’s structure and language, its complex array of themes, its primary metaphors and symbols. It was an intelligent if finally unwieldy and unsuccessful attempt. But it is also the sort of attempt that ought to be appreciated for what it sought to do as much as it merits criticism for the ways in which it failed.
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