Movies: He Had a Great Fall

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Yes, Warren, despite his penchant for overripe prose, created an indelible portrait of the American demagogue. And, yes, we acknowledge there is a touch of Willie Stark in every politician who catches the national eye. The line between idealism and opportunism is ever thin as paper. But in Willie's relentless, utterly insatiable appetites there is something beyond the powers of political commentary or literary criticism to convey. It is much more than a conventional ambition, a presidential dream. Lots of men entertain that fantasy. What drives him is an unacknowledged anarchy of the soul. There is no reason why Willie must possess aristocratic Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet), daughter of the state's last great Governor and the woman Burden has impotently loved his entire life. It is just that she is there--blond, vulnerable and an all-too-symbolic representative of the class he can never join but has to screw any way that he can.

Ultimately, of course, Anne is Willie's undoing. But it is important to Warren, and to Zaillian, who has the courage to let his very handsome movie unfold at a stately but not self-important pace, that its tragedy is located not in the semicomic hurly-burly of politics but in the dankness of the heart. What's being said here is that politics is always, at least temporarily, reformable--Willie Stark, for a moment, had that power--but that irrational need is beyond governance.