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KING BLUSTER To be sure, John Goodman gives the title role of TNT’s Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long all he can—P.T. Barnum as a sinking politician. Pressing the flesh, Goodman’s Long corn-pones verbatim, “A Democrat will hurt ya a little, but a Republican will kill ya permanent.” Confirming his manifesto he boasts, “Politics is the game of kings, and in that game, I am God.” In being warned he’s violating the Louisiana Constitution, he proclaims, “I am the Constitution!” Wearing a nightshirt looking like a slip, or in near Army-green silk p.j.s, or in straw hats and white spectators, he revels in a theatrical Louisiana accent and walks with a marching strut—a sort of super-schmoozy Boss Finley. People magazine says Goodman gives a “volcanic” performance, suggesting he vents a power derived from the depths of his molten, gaseous character. But for all of his showboating, the real Huey isn’t quite here. Writer Paul Monash has too broadly sketched Long—all flash and no insight—and we’re left with a most unsatisfactory vagueness. It’s too safe a portrait; we have to want to believe Huey’s dangerous. And it’s the intent to present him as warning: Huey, Goodman says, “tapped into the feeling of malaise and the little people feeling so squeezed. He recognized what people wanted and needed in his own state, and he tapped into that. Whether he could have turned the whole country to him we’ll never know. But if he had, I think he’d have been dangerous. It could happen again.” Goodman doesn’t zero in on what was perceived to be dangerous about Huey—he was an explosive paradox, an “obsessively political” demagogue advocating a form of Americanism (“Every Man a King”) and a populist-socialist trumpeting a program called “Share Our Wealth.” A high school dropout with a photographic memory who became a lawyer by passing a special single test, Huey was an adulterer-father of three, a chronic insomniac, a voracious boozer and eater, an arrogant liar who made great fun of his impeachment problems and was not above using martial law in Louisiana to intimidate voters into electing his hand-picked candidates. (While senator, he was the power behind a puppet governor.) When Huey died at 42 from a gunshot fired by Dr. Carl Weiss, there was shock but no surprise: untold numbers of state citizens openly talked about “getting rid” of him. (The assassin was killed on the spot, his body riddled with some sixty bullets.) If no one’s been able to figure out if Long really believed in what he preached—the nation’s wealth, being held by 10% of citizens, had to be re-distributed—in some instances he was no blowhard: he riled up the rich bigots by fulfilling his pledge to provide more schools, school buses and free text books for the poor. He also lived up to the promises of more roads and bridges. Concurrently, he used the rich’s tactics of enrichment—demanding kickbacks, bribes and supposedly “voluntary” contributions from state bureaucrats, automatically deducted from their paychecks. These funds went into the infamous “deduct box,” regarded as the smoking gun to finish off Huey’s presidential ambitions, about which the movie’s FDR, played in a flat caricature by Bob Gunton (the warden who is outfoxed by Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption), worries over. Yet we can’t get a fix on the extent of Huey’s game; just as we think we’re onto something—the revelation of FDR’s men being caught on tape discussing possible assassination—the potentially damaging information is discarded. Monash as writer is somewhat like Gypsy Rose Lee as stripper—all tease and no real exposure. Evocatively designed by Thomas A. Welsh, Kingfish is a fast two hours, and it includes a cameo by Brent Spiner as snitch doing a funny on the word “bazeer,” something John’s in need of. But it’s all too whizzy: this whale of a tale warrants an additional hour of detail. Goodman, often the emotional center of Roseanne (especially appreciated when Roseanne and Jackie are on yet another anti-mother tirade), is the uncrowned king of American broad stroking, a performer in love with improvisational send ups. Watching him do Elvis in jail on Roseanne, or listening to him sing “Tiny Bubbles” and “The Duke of Earl” in peruke and jabot in King Ralph are bits of bliss. Unfortunately, Ralph, the gooey Always and gadget-loaded The Flintstones sacrifice him to script inanities. Because of the reliance on media burlesque, Goodman’s entertaining star turns in The Babe and Kingfish unwittingly confirm Harold Ickes’s famous put down—Huey (and probably Babe too) suffered “from halitosis of the intellect.” Huey said of himself, “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool party man. I don’t know just what party I’m in right now, but I’m for the party.” Goodman, who co-produced, plays Huey less as Kingfish and more as Kingbluster—the life of the party. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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