Word: zaillian
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Sony Pictures Entertainment Directed by Steven Zaillian 2 stars I will now blaspheme the gods of American literature: I do not like Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.” An unscientific facebook.com search tells me that the 700-page political tome is the favorite book of 123 of my peers. Preceptor Tom “Your Biggest Fan” Underwood of “Southern Writers Reconsidered” fame begged me to consider this a masterpiece of Southern literature. I think I fell asleep that...
...Loews Theater in Harvard Square. Following the film, David T. Ellwood ’75, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government and Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy, hosted a question and answer forum with several members of the production team: screenwriter and director Steven Zaillian, executive producer David Thwaites, and producers Mike Medavoy and Arnold Messer. Fans of actor Mark Ruffalo were disappointed, however, as he was not present in spite of advertisements to the contrary. The four speakers eagerly expressed their pride in the film, which Medavoy calls their “labor of love...
...writer-director of the new film, Steven Zaillian, says he has never seen Rossen's very good film, and that probably makes sense. Zaillian's movie is much more a reimagining than a remake, and it's much more faithful to the tone of the novel, which is by no means easy to duplicate. Warren was a prolix and poetic writer, and a man torn between conflicting loyalties. He began his career as a Southern conservative, celebrating the agrarian traditions of the region, but found himself fascinated by the vulgar, driving (and possibly transformative) energy of Huey Long, Louisiana...
...that it's a study in how power corrupts, and that Willie is essentially a good man ruined by dictatorial depravity. Sean Penn strikes that note, playing him with a kind of bantam-rooster energy--and good-ole-boy charm. But something else is present, thanks in part to Zaillian's alertness to Warren's nuances. Willie has what Huey Long surely did not: a primitive sense of original sin. He believes the world is essentially dirt and that man is born of that filth. He speaks of man living out his life between the stench of the diaper...
Ultimately, of course, Anne is Willie's undoing. But it is important to Warren, and to Zaillian, who has the courage to let his very handsome movie unfold at a stately but not self-important pace, that its tragedy is located not in the semicomic hurly-burly of politics but in the dankness of the heart. What's being said here is that politics is always, at least temporarily, reformable--Willie Stark, for a moment, had that power--but that irrational need is beyond governance...