Cautionary tale January 18, 2007

THE only redeeming feature of gout is that it gives you all the time to read and watch DVDs, such as the throbbing ache in the swollen part of your anatomy and the fuzziness in your brain from the painkillers will allow. I paid the price for my Christmas indulgence for the better part of last week, which allowed me those pleasures along with the pain.

I finished Peter Mayle’s “A Good Year,” a light read but which tortured me agonizingly with the thought of having to forego, probably forever, the infinite delights of the elixir he speaks of. That, of course, as the title suggests, is wine.

I haven’t yet seen the movie to be able to know if the movie does justice to the book. The book itself isn’t a masterpiece, but I can at least say with much conviction that it is thoroughly delectable, if not imbibe-able. Mayle has a marvelously felicitous way of putting things, particularly about the French. But I’ll save all that for later. Suffice it to say it was a breather after having to plod through Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” last December.

I caught as well some of the movies that are vying for awards this year, and can say with as much conviction that “Babel,” “Little Children” and “Children of Men” will grab a good number of them. “Babel” will probably win big, unless the judges are stricken by inspired madness, or genius, and decide to bestow the honors on “Borat.”

But the one movie I found especially interesting in my non-peripatetic days is “All the King’s Men.” What drew me to it were the reviews of the 2006 version, which were largely scathing. Most of them wondered how a movie that brought together an overwhelming cast could succeed only in underwhelming audiences. The cast includes Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo and the redoubtable Anthony Hopkins. How can you possibly mess up with a crew like that? Well, you can mess up big.

I knew the 1949 version had gone on to win three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Well, it’s another lesson to people who like to make remakes. If you’re going to do one, remake a bad movie, not a classic. In the first, you have nowhere to go but up, and in the second, you have nowhere to go but down.

What I did was watch the two movies one after the other, the 1949 first and the 2006, second. The latter does pale in comparison, which is not a little ironic in that the first is black and white and the second full color. Looking at it now, the 1949 version seems a little simplistic, a good man wanting to do right by his fellows driven to seek power to accomplish it and succumbing to its corruptive influence. Indeed reaching heights of megalomaniacal ambition and corrupting everyone around him in turn. But its very “simplistic-ness,” its depiction of the problem in relentless black and white, is its own strength. Broderick Crawford in particular has the raw power and physical size to carry it off.

The 2006 version goes for subtler shades but succeeds not in being subtle but in being diffused. It’s on Penn’s shoulders the movie’s ability to command suspension of disbelief falls, and alas, Penn’s normally sturdy shoulders cannot support the weight. As one critic pointed out, Penn is better given to playing introspective characters with all their nuances than extroverted -- indeed as in this case charismatically bombastic -- ones in all their primary colors.

“All The King’s Men” tells the story of Willie Stark, a self-made, small-town crusader, who, unable to buck City Hall’s shenanigans merely by exposing them, decides to fight it at its own game by joining politics. He succeeds marvelously, drawing fellow hicks to his camp by empathy and solidarity. His success becomes his undoing, driving him to do good by the ways of bad, to give to the people by the ways of "trapo politics" [traditional politics]. In the 1949 version at least, that proposition is spelled out in, well, black and white: Good can come from bad. Or indeed more than that, good can’t come from anything else but bad. But as the movie spells out also in black and white, you start thinking that way, you’ll reach a point where you won’t be able to tell black from white, good from bad, anymore.

It’s a theme that has more resonance to us today than to Americans, which I suspect is also one of the reasons the new version didn’t go over well with the audiences, apart from the critics. Of particular interest to me is the character of the narrator, Jack Burden, a journalist played in the original by John Ireland and in the remake by Jude Law. Coming from an elite family, though one whose fortunes had tremendously declined, and full of lofty sentiment, he’s the one who catapults Stark to fame by writing about him in a newspaper. He subsequently joins him after Stark becomes governor, only to have his idealism peeled off from him layer after layer, principle after principle, compelling him to betray friend and family. Compelling him, that is, in one sense: He finds he no longer has the will to resist.

It’s a cautionary tale, and one I would particularly recommend to those as yet untouched by today’s pervasive corruption. Jack Burden’s fate I’ve seen happen abundantly to ex-activists and ex-friends, and I don’t know that I’m being entirely cynical when I say I won’t bother to recommend it to them. It won’t help greatly to wrench them from where they are. But for the rest of you, well, you can do worse by spending four hours singing karaoke.

Meanwhile, I’m glad to report that I am rejoicing (reveling might suggest a recidivist return to dissipation) in being able to move about again. To those who keep offering to teach me to dance, please know that my ambitions lie entirely in being able to walk.

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