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Jack with old friends Anne (Kate Winslet) and Adam (Mark Ruffalo)

But if sin is this film's subject, then what is sin, exactly? Stark mixes his religious rhetoric with references to evolution and privately tells one character that goodness is just something that people make up as they go along; if you'll pardon the metaphor (and this is not how he puts it), Stark suggests in effect that the only way to rise above the filth of the world is to b.s. our way into believing in something better—but it's still b.s., which isn't really all that different from filth, is it?

What's missing from this film is a profound sense of goodness, absent though it may be from the lives of these characters. Burden occasionally pines for a sort of lost innocence—especially when he reflects on his childhood with friends Adam (Mark Ruffalo) and Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet)—but goodness and innocence are not quite the same thing. Neither Stark nor the film show any real awareness of the goodness that human beings have fallen from and have the potential to return to.

So much for the film's thematic problems. Then there are the narrative problems, beginning with the fact that the bulk of this story has been moved to the 1950s. The original novel was inspired by the career of Huey P. Long, the Louisiana politician who served as governor and senator between 1928 and 1935, and Stark's politics—his populist, big-spending programs—fit perfectly within the cultural dynamics of the Great Depression. But, as Victor Morton has asked, would they really have been all that popular during the booming post-war economy of the Eisenhower era?

Stark wants to find the dirt on Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins)

The film also takes a while to find its footing, lurching as it does from the present to the past to something in between and then flashing back to something even further back in the past—and that's all just in the first few reels. Things like that kill a story's momentum. In addition, Zaillian repeatedly violates the law of "show, don't tell," by having his characters constantly tell each other things that we really ought to be able to see for ourselves. And he shows very little interest in the practical social realities within which these characters live. What sort of interactions does Willie Stark have with his fellow politicians, nemeses though many of them may be? Why do the senators suddenly want to impeach him? Yes, yes, we know they are in the pockets of Big Oil, but what has Stark done that he could be impeached for?

Questions like these leave you wondering if entire subplots ended up on the cutting room floor, and by the end of the film, you are left wondering who or what it was supposed to be about. If movies are politics and audiences are the electorate, then moviegoers may want to vote for one of the other candidates at the multiplex.

1. What is the nature of sin? How does it relate to goodness? Are we all tainted by it equally
2. What is the nature of goodness? Do we just make it up? Does it come from somewhere else? How do we tell the difference
3. How do people become bad? At what point do you think Willie Stark becomes a corrupt politician? Was he always corrupt? What is the significance of orange soda pop and liquor in signifying goodness and badness in this film
4. One character says, "Everything else can be filthy and corrupt, but a man doesn't have to be." Do you think his actions prove this claim? Disprove it?

All the King's Men is rated PG-13 for an intense sequence of violence (in which two people are shot multiple times and blood spills across the floor), sexual content (mostly consisting of exotic dancers and references to infidelity) and partial nudity (a woman lies on a bed and covers her chest with her hands). God's name is also taken in vain a few times.

Photos © Copyright Sony Pictures

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