The film deals with that full experience behind Lyndon B. Johnson taking over as President of the United States in the wake of the chaos to assassinate John F. Kennedy. This documentary embodies a detailed pathway behind its early days from assassination to battle over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other unknown events.
It's been a while since I saw a TV movie that had everything going for it, yet failed to be memorable. All the Way should have been a classic: electrifying, surprising, moving, artful. It's not.
The writing only takes the time to make LBJ into a fully fleshed-out, complex creature, while everyone else is judged simply by Roach and Schenkken's bland conception of moral codes.
Just as Johnson steamrolled opposition en route to a landslide 1964 election victory, so Cranston's charisma blew everyone else clean off screen. The actor also went "all the way" and it was absorbing to watch.
All the Way is a firm lesson in the price and struggle of progress in American democracy, and the perhaps impossibility of a "nice guy" president. It's also an illustration of both how much and how little has changed in 50 years.
Director Jay Roach turns Robert Schenkkan's acclaimed Broadway play into an engrossing, powerful if slightly overcrowded movie that works as a biopic of LBJ and as a time capsule of a crucial period in the civil rights movement.
Johnson had the same insecurities we all do; but whatever happened, he made sure it happened on his terms. All The Way never lets you forget that legacies, like most things, are mediated by power.
