"There Ain't Any Explanations. Not Of Anything. All You Can Do Is Point At The Nature Of Things. If You're Smart Enough To See 'Em"

We finally managed to watch the 2006 version of All the King's Men. And on paper, this book should make a fantastic movie. Hollywood loves 'em some political movies with over-the-top characters, adultery, and murder, right? And in casting, this movie should have been boffo (Sean Penn? Kate Winslet? Jude Law? Anthony Hopkins? Patricia Clarkson? James Gandolfini? Mark Ruffalo?). Seriously? It has hand-picked Oscar bait all over it, right?

And for some reason, it just didn't connect the right way for me. The movie was very true to the book (with only a couple changes for simplification). But there were just a handful of things that bugged me, and prevented me from really giving it 2 thumbs up:

• I could not STAND all of Sean Penn's arm gesticulating as Willie Stark. I mean, after a while, that's all I was watching. I was hardly listening, but just thinking, "He's just sitting having a normal conversation with 2 other people. Why does he need to flail his arms around like he's speaking to a crowd of a thousand or something?" There was certainly mention of Willie's public speaking style in the book, and how he lured people in with his charisma, but no discussion of all the flailing. And there was a lot of it. Arms. Flailing. Gesticulating. He was almost event kind of floppy at certain points. Like he was going to break out into a Harlem shake at any moment. So yes, completely distracted. It's sad when one simple thing can single-handedly alter an entire movie.
• The music in the movie was so oddly timed and distracting. And inappropriately melodramatic. Normally, I never ever notice music in a movie, except when it's classic and really elevates those key moments of a movie to epic status (think ET flying off in the basket of a bike, or an Indiana Jones chase scene). But there was all this big, sweeping music in strange moments, like a car pulling up to a farm house. I just didn't get it. And again, distracting.
• While the movie was very true to the book, it almost could have been longer. Clocking in at 128 minutes, that's shorter than just about every superhero movie that has come out in the last few years. The extra time I think would have helped to develop some pieces a little more to emotionally invest the viewer in what was going on a little more (like the relationships between Jack, Adam, and Anne, and the complexities of Jack's relationship with Judge Irwin). While these things were conveyed sufficiently enough to get the storyline across in the movie, it just could have been amped up a bit.

So, while it was a solid movie, it just could have been so so much better. With the excellence of material that Robert Penn Warren offers, it's a shame it wasn't a 4 star movie. I guess I'll have to go back to the 1949 version and see if that one hits all the notes better.