Well, it’s officially Fall. The new television season has started. Football is being played. In the movies, we’ve put away the random explosions, the buddy comedies, and the glut of spandex laden heroes. It’s grown folks movie season, the time for actors and studios to begin their Academy Award stumping (or dumping with movies they couldn’t place any other time of the year). All the King’s Men is a bit of both.

All the King’s Men, a remake of the 1949 Oscar winner, tells the story of the rise of a charismatic everyman politician and his eventual fall due to the lure of corruption. Sean Penn plays Willie Stark, a self-described “hick” (modeled after Louisiana’s governor, Huey Long), a seemingly honest man cast about in a sea of backroom, backwater politics and the Good Ol’ Boy network, swimming against the tide of corruption. Used by controlling interests to split the “cracker” vote until he becomes his own man; unfortunately, being his own man also means being fully capable of falling into his own self-made pit of corruption.

Jude Law portrays jaded reporter, Jack Burden, whose guiding philosophy of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” keeps him as more observer of life than participant. He goes so far as to admit that “I don’t care. If I did, I’d do something about it.” Between the two characters, we have a fascinating character study, a time of when politicians were allowed to be characters not overly packaged commodities. As such, Sean Penn and Jude Law give noteworthy turns (though I still have no idea what accent James Gandolfini’s Tiny Duffy was affecting).

The temptation of power becomes that Stark effectively gets in bed with the devil in order to do the right thing. Believing that we’re all sinful creatures, but that good can come from bad, Stark doesn’t quite realize his fundamental problem: that he can no longer tell good from wrong, worthy ends from evil means.

Duffy: “God works in mysterious ways.”
Stark: “Sometimes he has others do his work.”

Ultimately, this movie is about the pursuit of truth, and conversely, how the truth pursues you. Even after professing that “I”m gonna keep my faith in the people. You know why? Time brings all things to light,” Willie Stark doesn’t quite understand the nature of faith and truth. His first problem with the truth revolved around how best to convey it. He sounded every bit like the same old politician the people had heard before. Only after he finds his voice does he decide to incarnate the truth, be what it is the people need and tell them what they need to know. S sometimes the full truth is too complicated, especially for sheep-like “hicks.” He became one of them, a “superficial sap.”

Despite his vowing not to be used by the powers - the Empire, the imperial order - reality says that the reach of rampant consumerism, fueled by global capitalism and an individualistic sensibility, and ruled by strict economic and militaristic control, or in this case, centralized power in the hands of a few huge corporations is rarely denied. Stark’s “The power is in the hands of the powerless,” meek shall inherit the governor’s office rhetoric reminds us of a what if someone took Jesus’ message of being about the poor and ran on his message as a political platform. Like Jesus, Stark’s promises to the poor was all but a declaration of war to the rich/the Empire.

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