Vindicated
Or at least the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott agrees with me:
Nothing in [All the King’s Men] works. It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents. Only Ms. Clarkson, who really is from Louisiana, and Jackie Earle Haley, who utters few words, manage to acquit themselves credibly.
It is rare to see a movie so prodigiously stuffed with fine actors, nearly every one of them grievously miscast. Ms. Winslet, bathed in light or veiled in gauze, looks nearly as dazed as Mr. Ruffalo. Mr. Penn, stepping into one of Broderick Crawford’s great blowhard roles, tries to reconnect Willie Stark, a self-described “hick,” with his rustic origins, emphasizing the character’s diffidence and low cunning as well as his strutting arrogance. What is missing, though, is the full, Shakespearean measure of Willie’s charisma.
Mr. Penn is, fundamentally, an antitheatrical, naturalistic actor, whose great gift is his ability to convey inwardness. His narrow face, with its close-set eyes and thin mouth, seems closed in on itself. Expansiveness does not come easily to him, but Willie is the kind of populist leader who grows larger in public, where he feeds on the anger and adoration of the people.
Mr. Penn rants and shouts and waves his fist in the air — “Your need is my justice,” he bellows — but you never feel the galvanizing force of that essential connection, or the ebullient showboating that is its authentic form of expression. Mr. Penn is in some ways too fine an actor to play a country ham like Willie Stark.
If I could see the movie was miscast without even watching it, one has to wonder what the director was thinking.
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