For me, Jay Roach, Robert Schenkan and Bryan Cranston‘s All The Way (HBO, 5.21) is a more engaging thing than the Broadway play version, which I saw and reviewed exactly two years ago. (I expressed modest misgivings — the key phrase was “engaged but not emotionally engulfed.”) I know the Lyndon Johnson saga backwards and forwards, and yet I was gripped and fascinated by this strategic re-telling. It’s about as tightly organized, propulsive and snappy as anyone could reasonably expect.
And yes, Cranston kills as LBJ in a performance that hits all the highs and lows of his Tony Award-winning performance but with extra seasoning that allows for a bit more compassion. Most of Cranston’s stage performance was about LBJ’s grand overbearing manner and gusto with maybe 25% conveying his doubts and uncertainties. In the HBO film it feels more like a 60-40 deal.
Like the play version, All The Way lacks the emotional sweep and tragic dimension of Dave Grubin‘s LBJ, the 1991 American Experience documentary. The focus is strictly on Johnson’s first year in office (JFK’s murder to LBJ’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in November ’64), and as much as I would have preferred to see Cranston play Johnson in a five- or six-hour miniseries combining All The Way with Schenkan’s The Great Society (which was performed on stage in Seattle late 2014), that was never on the table.
And yet there’s no denying that the HBO version, like the play, is an expertly written ensemble piece and a crackling political drama. The bonus is that Roach’s film takes the story into more intimate realms. Like any good director would have, he finesses and intensifies in a way that no stage director could have managed. The camera doesn’t just stay close to Johnson but slips into his recesses, fears, inner determinations, anxieties. The film is more affecting for this effort. Yes, Cranston delivers all of the shadings and crafty impulses and whatnot — all the scrappy bombast that came through on stage but with a sadder, more vulnerable underside.
