FYI - My honest rating for this film is **, but I have the 1/2 because despite the film's problems, Penn at least delivers the bacon.
What went wrong?
The Pulitzer prize-winning masterpiece of American literature is a compelling and thoughtful account of a Huey Long-esque figure's rise from noble political crusader to a beast of the machine, to his bloody downfall. It documents the 1930s South in such a fashion that few books have ever pulled off.
Yet, the film from Steve Zillian is simply neither compelling nor thoughtful. If this film was a sentient being, he would be like the co-worker who doesn't clean up or courteous at work. As in, if this film was a person, it wouldn't give a shit...but unlike the OTHER film I saw today, it just doesn't care about what its doing.
Sean Penn kicks ass, in the best Oscar-hunting performance that the Academy usually digs. Even if I question him as being authentic or really organic as a demagogue "man of the people" politician from the Deep South of the Great Depression(since as a person from the South, film actors either get the accent right or wrong. No middle ground. Luckily, Penn doesn't fuck up like say Nicole Kidman did with COLD MOUNTAIN).
However, and I can't fucking believe I'm saying this, but Hopkins, Winslet, Law....OScar-nominated, respected English actors....really coast like mother fuckers. Maybe they did the best that they could with what Zailian wrote for them, or they simply saw this movie as a nice Oscarbait opportunity.
Sadly, despite the nice budget, the pretty cinematography, and even the nice-sounding cast, I should have suspected something when SONY pulled this movie from the Oscar season of last year, into September of this year.
Zailian was the scriptwriter of course for Spielberg's SCHINDLER' LIST, a cerebral, emotional tale of a dark time in history, with a central player trying overtly and not to deal with such inhumanity. ALL THE KING'S MEN is simply artificial Oscar-bait that in any other year, with the Weinstein Brothers Oscar-machine, might have been up for several Oscars.
