All the King's Men - so many stars they can barely all fit on the screen

How can a movie with an all-star cast fail? All the King's Men is a prime example of just how easy it is.
Part of the problem seems to be that the script can't decide who the story is about: is it Willie Stark, played by Sean Penn, or the equally significantly-named Jack Burden, played by Jude Law.
The Sean Penn scenes, the ones in which he's the focus, have an energy and aggressiveness, mostly due to the full-in-your-face Penn performance. When he's off-stage, the cast, including Law, all seem to be playing a movie that's going on underwater. Everything is taken at a slow, meaningful pace, full of glances and elusive dialogue. This isn't the cast's fault: everyone of these people has played intense roles before, and held our interest fully. But the Jack Burden side of the story, with all its psychological stuff (made even more heavy-handed by a voice over from Law, full of portentous hints and warnings) isn't that interesting, and the cast do their best with what are basically underwritten roles.
Penn himself comes most alive in his speechifying, but he's adopted an accent so thick that often the speeches loose comprehensibility. The rest of the cast are easy to understand: we just don't know why they're saying what they're saying!
The film takes a curious turn about fifteen to twenty minutes in. Stark is portrayed initially as a quiet do-gooder, a man of integrity who's unlike all the corrupt politicians and businessmen around him. Burden is seemingly amoral. And then, after a scene in which Stark downs a full glass of whisky (he's always drunk soft drink up till then) and collapses on the floor, the roles all seem to reverse. Stark is shown as increasingly corrupt; Burden is a man with a conscience; Patricia Clarkson, who is woefully underused in her role, turns from being a woman on the make in the political scene to a kind of mother-figure-cum-mistress who's being used herself, and James Gandolfini ceases to be the slimy, sly political force intent on getting Stark elected, and becomes a blithering idiot without another decent scene in the film.
And besides these actors we also have Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins, two more Brits adopting various versions of Louisiana accents (they are playing upper-class Americans, of course), and Mark Ruffalo as Winslet's brother. He gets to play the most underwritten character of all. Seemingly he's a medical person of some sort, but he spends his time playing the piano - we think. And then he gets pulled into the arena to front a new hospital that Stark is building. A less-likely front man is hard to imagine, as Ruffalo is allowed no charisma, nothing to show that he might have any substance. And then finally he comes quietly out of the shadows and shoots Stark. Hmmm. And gets shot himself.
The build-up to this climax is almost entirely lacking in tension. We're really quite happy to see Stark gunned down, because he's such a snot; but because Ruffalo has been such an unassuming character we're puzzled why he also gets shot, as he seems to be performing a public service.
Winslet drifts in and out of the movie, and the scene that should be most significant, when seemingly Burden rejects making love to her, is confused (and made even more so by the voice-over), and so we have little idea what she's supposed be doing in the film. Hopkins is strong enough, but again he's more tied up with the Burden story than the Stark one, and that again confuses the role he plays.
The whole thing needs reshuffling to bring one side or the other into focus. Pity to waste such a cast on such twaddle.

Two movies

We last saw Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River in Melbourne, when we were visiting there about four years ago. It’s a powerful and disturbing movie that keeps on uncovering more layers just when you think you’ve got it sussed out. The acting is uniformly superb, especially amongst the three male leads, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon, and the two wives: Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden.. With a kind of gritty almost documentary look to the photography, none of the actors are allowed to look like ‘film stars’; every crease and crevice in their faces is visible.

I don’t know why it’s such a moving film, considering that it’s violent and has a murderer at its heart, paedophilia as one of its subject matters, petty criminals acting as though they’re pillars of society, a wife who dobs her husband in and another wife who turns out to have an incredibly warped view of morality - and policemen who can’t pin down at least two murders because they’ve been so well covered. And then there’s the ongoing silent phone calls from Bacon’s wife, which becomes the only thing to be resolved by the end of the movie. (The murders and murderers are resolved but not at all comfortably.)

Somehow Eastwood makes us have sympathy for these people: Penn’s attempts to repress his sorrow for his daughter, the way Robbins has the incident from his childhood hanging over his whole life, Bacon’s disillusionment with his job. It’s a man’s film, about tough men, but it’s not a blokey one. There are genuine tears aplenty. These are tragic characters fit to stand alongside some of the great tragic characters of famous dramas. They may not be as articulate, but their sorrows and pains are as deep.

Curiously Laura Linney appeared in the film that followed Mystic River on TV last night. It was an odd piece called You Can Count On Me, and somehow, in spite of excellent acting from Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and yet another of the Culkin clan - Rory – it never really took off. It was hard to figure what writer/director Kenneth Lonergan was trying to do. It’s billed as a comedy, but it’s seldom laugh-out-loud funny, in spite of some humorous scenes. Lonergan himself appears as a priest in it, and it’s hard to tell whether we’re supposed to take the guy seriously or see him as a bit of a fraud.

Linney’s character accuses her somewhat shiftless brother of hypocrisy, but this comes oddly out of her mouth when she’s having it off with the boss, and her boyfriend, and telling lies to her child and brother. We never quite know what to make of her: does she know what she wants and can’t find it, or is she just confused. Perhaps her brother is the one who’s really alive by contrast? None of these things are clear enough to make sense for the viewer.

Leonard Maltin calls it ‘a wonderful comedy-drama about the peccadilloes of sibling relationships, the workplace, and life in general, sparked by great performances and an unusually perceptive script.’ Ebert calls it one of the best movies of the year, saying that it’s rare ‘for the director to be more fascinated by the process than the outcome.’ Unfortunately while that might be fair enough, it’s very unsatisfying for the audience, and the lack of any sort of denouement leaves the viewers up in the air.

Salon.com gets closer to how I felt about the movie: ‘All the praise being heaped on "You Can Count on Me," the filmmaking debut of New York playwright Kenneth Lonergan, may say more about the tepid state of American cinema in 2000 than about this wry, modestly appealing small-town drama.’

It could have been a good comedy; instead it shifts back and forth between serious drama and hurts, and never quite makes up its mind where it wants to wind up.

Dead Man Walking

I was just about to go to bed last night when I found that Dead Man Walking was on tv. I hadn’t seen it again since it first came out in 1995, and though it had already started I finished up watching more than three-quarters of it again.
What an emotionally-charged movie it is. Sean Penn gives the performance of a life-time, making us alternatively like and dislike this arrogant, young man who’s gone along with the disruptive antics of an older man whom he admires, and finishes up raping a young woman and killing her boyfriend to impress him. Even though he was 35 at the time the film was released, he is more than credible as a young man in his early twenties.
Susan Sarandon’s performance is more subtle, and a great deal is conveyed by her expression rather than her speech, but it’s far superior to many of the performances she’s given subsequently.
The Christian aspect of it, for once, isn’t made a fool of. Tim Robbins, as director and writer, could have made the priest who counsels Sister Helen into one of those caricatured religious beings who pervade many movies over the last two or three decades. Instead, he shows a man who is struggling to see the right way through a difficult situation.
But the three other outstanding performances are those of Raymond Barry as the father of the boy who’s been killed, and Lee Ermey and Celia Weston as the parents of the raped and murdered girl. These three must have revelled in the space Robbins gives them to give depth to their characters. We swing from sympathy to irritation to anger to sympathy again as we watch them relate their stories to Sister Jean – who isn’t always the most sympathetic of listeners herself.
And talking of space, you never feel as though this story is hurried in any way. There isn’t that rush cutting so typical of modern movies, where one scene is barely over before another one is shoving its way in.
One other performance should be mentioned: Roberta Maxwell as Penn’s mother. She could easily have gone over the top, since she’s a woman given to bursting into tears. Instead we have to face with her the fact that somehow she’s brought up a ‘monster’ and her bewilderment as to how this could have happened, and we are glad to see Sister Jean holding her in the worst moments, as that’s what we’d all want to have done.
Couple of bits of trivia: Jack Black has a relatively small role in it, as Penn’s brother, and there’s a popular indie-band in The Netherlands called "Seanpenn".