Book vs. film: The beauty of 'All the King's Men' is in the prose
Great books don't seem to live on anymore, at least not in the same, swaggering way they did before information overload hit us all. So we should be grateful there is a new movie version of "All the King's Men" to save the greatest American novel of the 20th century from obscurity. (Two questions about Robert Penn Warren's 1946 book have recently been posed on "Jeopardy," and both times drew a blank from all of the contestants.)
To be sure, the casting of Sean Penn as corrupt, spellbinding politician Willie Stark, who makes goodness out of badness because "there isn't anything else to make it out of," is off-putting. Penn is a solid actor, but when it gets right down to it, he's really little more than a high-gloss Steve Buscemi, specializing in ferret-like little guys on the margins of society (see "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "The Falcon and the Snowman" and "Sweet and Lowdown," for starters). He is not, by any reasonable definition of the phrase, larger than life, a prime qualification for the role of Willie Stark.
But the good news is that Jude Law plays Jack Burden, and Law is a movie star, too. Which means that, unlike the original 1949 movie version, Jack will not be knocked down to supporting status by the flashier Willie. Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is, after all, Jack's story, not Willie's, no matter what a couple generations of political-science professors have to say about it. (Entertainment Weekly, in its summer movie preview issue, made the same old mistake, mentioning Burden only in passing, as "Stark's functionary.")
In fact, not only is "All the King's Men" not about Willie, it's also not really about politics. In the end, it's a love story. You can't possibly think it's anything else after reading how Jack, back in his college days, describes his childhood friend, Anne Stanton:
"I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing round-toed, black patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, 'Hello, Jack,' while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come."
The point being this: read the book before seeing the movie. The beauty of the prose inevitably will be lost in the translation to the screen. Even the movie's writer-director, Oscar-winner Steve Zaillian, recognizes this, saying of the novel: "It's like poetry. I think it's as close to Shakespeare as we've gotten here."
Along with the beauty of the writing itself, there's also the complexity of the storytelling, which certainly will have to be pared to fit into a two-hour-long feature. Warren's "All the King's Men" is a morality tale, a character study and, one of the movie's chief marketing angles, a noir-ish mystery. Jack, Willie's right-hand man and a former doctoral student in history, must do some opposition research that will have a profound impact not only on Willie's opponents but also on Jack himself. "It was the 'Case of the Upright Judge,' " as Jack puts it, "and I had every reason to congratulate myself on a job well done. It was a perfect research job, marred in its technical perfection by only one thing: it meant something."
Be warned: As the Anne Stanton excerpt above makes clear, you are sure to find Warren long-winded; he never had any use for the spare, cut-to-the-chase style that his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, popularized. Warren, who died in 1989, couldn't even describe a straightforward symbol, a new highway that physically represents how Willie creates good from bad, without expounding on the ripeness of the Southern character at the dawn of the automobile era: "Where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car's speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the little beads of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you could call it that, from the hood ventilator."
Whew. You'll get a lot of sentences like that one in "All the King's Men." (Barney Oldfield, by the way, was the Dale Earnhardt Jr. of the early 20th century.) But the trip, however circuitous, is always worth it, for even after 60 years Warren's prose is sexy and smart and alive.
Just make sure you're reading the original published version of the novel and not the 2001 "restored" edition, a bastard child brought forth from the late author's unedited manuscript by a third-rate academic from the University of Southern Mississippi. You'll know you've got the wrong version if Willie Stark goes instead by the name of Willie Talos, an appellation more suited to a henchman for Ming the Merciless.
Authentic history mattered to Warren (as did a good editor), so he surely wouldn't have appreciated such posthumous tinkering. Or as Jack Burden put it, "all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us."
Warren's eyes may be imploring us now. Whatever life Zaillian gives Warren's masterwork, keep in mind that the one true definition is at a bookstore or library near you.
-- by Douglas Perry, originally published in The Oregonian, 2006
To be sure, the casting of Sean Penn as corrupt, spellbinding politician Willie Stark, who makes goodness out of badness because "there isn't anything else to make it out of," is off-putting. Penn is a solid actor, but when it gets right down to it, he's really little more than a high-gloss Steve Buscemi, specializing in ferret-like little guys on the margins of society (see "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "The Falcon and the Snowman" and "Sweet and Lowdown," for starters). He is not, by any reasonable definition of the phrase, larger than life, a prime qualification for the role of Willie Stark.
But the good news is that Jude Law plays Jack Burden, and Law is a movie star, too. Which means that, unlike the original 1949 movie version, Jack will not be knocked down to supporting status by the flashier Willie. Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is, after all, Jack's story, not Willie's, no matter what a couple generations of political-science professors have to say about it. (Entertainment Weekly, in its summer movie preview issue, made the same old mistake, mentioning Burden only in passing, as "Stark's functionary.")
In fact, not only is "All the King's Men" not about Willie, it's also not really about politics. In the end, it's a love story. You can't possibly think it's anything else after reading how Jack, back in his college days, describes his childhood friend, Anne Stanton:
"I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing round-toed, black patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, 'Hello, Jack,' while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come."
The point being this: read the book before seeing the movie. The beauty of the prose inevitably will be lost in the translation to the screen. Even the movie's writer-director, Oscar-winner Steve Zaillian, recognizes this, saying of the novel: "It's like poetry. I think it's as close to Shakespeare as we've gotten here."
Along with the beauty of the writing itself, there's also the complexity of the storytelling, which certainly will have to be pared to fit into a two-hour-long feature. Warren's "All the King's Men" is a morality tale, a character study and, one of the movie's chief marketing angles, a noir-ish mystery. Jack, Willie's right-hand man and a former doctoral student in history, must do some opposition research that will have a profound impact not only on Willie's opponents but also on Jack himself. "It was the 'Case of the Upright Judge,' " as Jack puts it, "and I had every reason to congratulate myself on a job well done. It was a perfect research job, marred in its technical perfection by only one thing: it meant something."
Be warned: As the Anne Stanton excerpt above makes clear, you are sure to find Warren long-winded; he never had any use for the spare, cut-to-the-chase style that his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, popularized. Warren, who died in 1989, couldn't even describe a straightforward symbol, a new highway that physically represents how Willie creates good from bad, without expounding on the ripeness of the Southern character at the dawn of the automobile era: "Where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car's speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the little beads of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you could call it that, from the hood ventilator."
Whew. You'll get a lot of sentences like that one in "All the King's Men." (Barney Oldfield, by the way, was the Dale Earnhardt Jr. of the early 20th century.) But the trip, however circuitous, is always worth it, for even after 60 years Warren's prose is sexy and smart and alive.
Just make sure you're reading the original published version of the novel and not the 2001 "restored" edition, a bastard child brought forth from the late author's unedited manuscript by a third-rate academic from the University of Southern Mississippi. You'll know you've got the wrong version if Willie Stark goes instead by the name of Willie Talos, an appellation more suited to a henchman for Ming the Merciless.
Authentic history mattered to Warren (as did a good editor), so he surely wouldn't have appreciated such posthumous tinkering. Or as Jack Burden put it, "all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us."
Warren's eyes may be imploring us now. Whatever life Zaillian gives Warren's masterwork, keep in mind that the one true definition is at a bookstore or library near you.
-- by Douglas Perry, originally published in The Oregonian, 2006
