(128 mins, 12A)
Directed by Steven Zaillian; starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Patricia Clarkson, James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins

Robert Rossen's 1949 movie All the King's Men was a tough, hard-hitting simplified version of the Robert Penn Warren novel that drew its inspiration from the career of the demagogic populist Huey Long, a home-grown fascist. Warren had observed Long's governorship at first hand while teaching at Louisiana State University in the 1930s. It brought Broderick Crawford a well-deserved Oscar for his performance as Willie Stark, the man of the people corrupted by power who confronted the ruthless corporations that ran the state in league with old money. Steven Zaillian's new version is a gloomy, listless affair taking place in dark rooms and under lowering skies.

Zaillian's biggest mistake has been to update the setting to the late Forties and early Fifties. By then, the transformation of the so-called 'banana republic of the United States' into a modern state had been achieved by Willie Stark/Huey Long, and the post-New Deal, post-Second World War America was a quite different place from that which Long dominated between 1928 and 1935.

The second mistake is the peevish, smirking performance of Sean Penn as Stark. He just doesn't have the crude, bull-like power or the mixture of sincerity, self-deception and dishonesty that Crawford brought to the part. The movie skirts both the detail of the political life and the transformation of Willie's character. Oddly, the thing that struck me most while watching this movie was the resemblance of All the King's Men to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - an upper-class narrator who becomes the confidant of a dangerous, powerful, self-made man who's murdered by a deranged assassin for reasons not central to the protagonist's actions. Penn Warren doesn't mention this in the informative preface he wrote for the 1974 edition of the novel.