Directed by Rob Reiner
Starring Woody Harrelson, Michael Stahl-David, Richard Jenkins, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Rated R
Robert Caro’s longstanding biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson runs for thousands of pages and there’s still a fifth book on the way.
So it is when it comes to the life of the 36th president of the United States, one of the most consequential and fascinating men to have ever assumed the position.
The only way to distill any sort of this man’s essence into a work of cinema that doesn’t stretch toward Ken Burns length is to take the approach of “All the Way,” the play and HBO movie starring Bryan Cranston that drilled down into the epochal battle over the passage of the 1964 Civil Right Act.
Rob Reiner’s “LBJ,” in which Woody Harrelson ably assumes the title role, runs for just 97 minutes. And yet it depicts Johnson’s battle with John F. Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination, his run as vice president, his perspective of that terrible day in Dallas and a good deal of the aftermath, leading up to his address to a joint session of Congress on Nov. 22, 1963.
It’s entirely too much — and as a consequence of that overwrought ambition, the movie ends up doing entirely too little.
Harrelson relishes playing the familiar archetypes — the aggressive deal-making, the good ol’ boy hectoring that seems positively quaint these days, the meetings with the door to the bathroom flung wide open.
Reiner knows his way around a big Hollywood production, and it’s nice to see him back in this mode after years in the wilderness.
But the movie’s too conventional and too scattered to add anything of substance or interest to the Johnson story.
