The first movie I ever reviewed in these pages, almost ten years ago, was a mediocre adaptation of All the King’s Men, in which Sean Penn was miscast as the Kingfish and a lot of very talented actors wasted their time supporting him. The film was much worse than its source material, but it shared with Robert Penn Warren’s novel a kind of moral fastidiousness, a distaste for actually existing democratic politics and politicians, that’s characteristic of many fictional treatments of American political life.
As Christopher Lehmann wrote around that time in an essay for the Washington Monthly, American novelists and filmmakers are often too in love with primal New World ideas about frontier virtue and Edenic innocence to see the political process with clear eyes. So the various attempts to tell a Great American Political Story mostly portray politics “as a great ethical contaminant and task their protagonists with escaping its many perils with both their lives and their moral compasses intact.”
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