“Attitude” perfectly sums up the highest aspiration of much of
today’s popular culture. It is to us what “respectability” was to
the Victorians: the tribute we pay to the supreme importance of
keeping up appearances. Indeed, attitude glories in appearance even
more than respectability does. You could lose respectability, but
attitude is forever. The respectable art of the Victorian era has
mostly and mostly deservedly been forgotten, and I predict that the
same fate awaits the “attitude” art — much of it in cinematic form
— of our own time. The latest example of such art is Steven
Zaillian’s adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel, All the
King’s Men, which enjoyed a certain reputation at one point as
a fictionalization of the career of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana
and was made into an Academy Award winning film with Broderick
Crawford in 1949.
It has to be said that the novel itself, published in 1946, was
to some extent an early example of attitude art, but Penn Warren
effectively disguised the fact by swaddling his rather feeble
mise-en-scene — the novel was essentially little more
than one of a raft of self-consciously “disillusioned” post-war
coming-of-age stories — in fine writing, masses of
authentic-sounding period detail and hints of political
seriousness. Of that camouflage, only the period detail survives in
Mr. Zaillian’s movie. And, to give it its due, that’s not nothing.
The washed out, faux black-and-white look of it —
seemingly, 90 percent of this portrait of sun-baked Louisiana is in
night scenes — is gorgeous. Hollywood’s devotion to attitude does
at least produce great visuals. But the hollowness — indeed, the
vacuity — behind the appearance is all too cruelly exposed,
especially in the film’s politics. Where Penn Warren had made the
demagoguery of his Huey Long-like hero, Willie Stark, the back-drop
to his tragic personal story, the new movie reverses the
relationship, making the personal story into an incidental soap
opera and moving the demagoguery to center stage.
It doesn’t work, and a moment’s thought will tell us why. Willie
is the governor of Louisiana: not a dictator, not a tyrant, not
even a very important figure on the national scene. His future as a
totalitarian and therefore a scare-figure is nil, and is seen to be
nil. He’s a small-timer to the very marrow, which is what gave him
his tragic stature in Penn Warren’s eyes. Yet Mr. Zaillian gives us
over and over again would-be scary shots of his Willie, Sean Penn,
in the full-flood of a Hitlerian harangue to rapt crowds of poor
Louisianans. These shots undoubtedly appealed to Mr. Penn’s talent
for the histrionic as well as his political proclivities, but they
only underline the picture’s political unseriousness. On one
occasion, a torch-lit night-time scene in front of what looks like
a monumental Mussolinian or Stalinist edifice, is obviously
designed to look like a Nazi rally at Nuremberg. The camera catches
Willie’s shadow, supposedly cast to several times life-size by the
flickering torchlight on the massive structure behind him, and we
are meant to think (I surmise) that the menacing shadow of fascism
stalks the land.
The occasion is the dedication of a medical center.
It’s absurd, of course, but then attitude movies don’t have to
make sense. Not making sense is rather the point of them. The
carelessness with which they treat details of plot and
characterization is typical of their cavalier disdain for humdrum,
everyday reality. For instance, we are told that Willie is under
impeachment from the legislature, but there is no mention of what
he is being impeached for. It’s enough, I guess, to hint
at a general atmosphere of corruption — even though the film also
makes the familiar point that corruption is a way of life in
Louisiana. The subtext is that corruption is a way of life
everywhere, and this kind of cheap cynicism is enough to
keep the narrator’s feelings of disillusionment front and center.
More than half a century later, we can take such disillusionment
for granted without any more specific motivations.
Likewise, we know that there is an estrangement between this
disillusioned, self-hating narrator, a journalist named Jack Burden
(Jude Law), and his lost love, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), but
there is no explanation for it apart from a flashback scene in
which, many years earlier, he had for no very persuasive reason,
once refused her sexual advances. He tells her that the two of them
have the future for sex, but apparently this future never happens.
Why, we’re not told. It doesn’t add up. We have to take Jack’s
unfulfilled longing on trust, which means that we also have to take
it on trust that he will react as he does to the information that
Anne is sleeping with Willie — a fact also unaccounted for. Is she
just a power-groupie? She doesn’t remotely seem the type. But,
again, the film doesn’t see the need to explain.
Her brother, Adam (Mark Ruffalo), is a portrait in pure
attitude. A tortured saint and genius, he hates Willie as do all of
his aristocratic connections, apart from Jack — who is too
disillusioned to hate anybody. But then Adam seems to hate the
whole world, including himself, as he hides himself away in a dingy
flat and plays the piano. What’s wrong with Adam? The film has no
ideas on the subject, apart from the suggestion that he is just too
good and compassionate not to be in a state of constant pain at all
the suffering in the world, since it is in order to alleviate this
suffering that he swallows his objections to Willie and goes to
work as director of the medical center. But he doesn’t have to like
it. Again, disillusionment is presumably meant to be its own
explanation.
When Adam gets his gun and goes after Willie, it is supposedly
because he thinks Willie is trying to frame him to take the fall
for corruption charges in relation to the Medical Center. The idea
makes no sense but, OK, maybe Adam’s brains are scrambled by
whatever it is that’s eating him. This motivation, such as it is,
has to be supplied presumably because the only one Penn Warren
mentions — the aristocratic Southern gentleman’s outrage at his
sister’s “whoredom” by such a creature as Willie — wouldn’t seem
enough to today’s audience. Why the sudden concern with supplying a
plausible motivation — even though it’s not very plausible — when
Mr. Zaillian hasn’t bothered with any up until now? There must be
some lingering sense left over from the old days when, as Hitchcock
said, the soul of the cinema was plot, some sense that a set-up was
required for the visually if not dramatically shocking denouement
which, like so much of the rest of the picture, self-consciously
looks back to the cinematic techniques and appearances of the
1940s.
That there’s not more of this sense is further testimony to the
fact that, nowadays, plot hardly matters. The soul of the cinema is
attitude.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.
He is the author of the new book, Honor: A History (Encounter
Books).
