LOS ANGELES — Any doubts that Bryan Cranston belongs on the shortlist of America’s greatest living actors are vanquished in an early moment from “All the Way.” The HBO biopic chronicles the chaos thrust upon — and generated by — Lyndon Baines Johnson in the period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his own election as president in 1964.
In the scene, the newly minted commander in chief is being tailored for a suit in the Oval Office while talking turkey with Minnesota’s Sen. Hubert Humphrey, cracking vulgar jokes with his aides, kissing up to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, cooing over the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., barking orders to his staff and firing a secretary on impulse, insisting her replacement have a “little meat on her bones.”
It’s a tour de force performance. It also has the benefit of being accurate.
“If you asked any of the individuals who worked with Johnson over the years, they would say something like, ‘He was the kindest, cruelest, most selfless, selfish son of a bitch, warmhearted, conniving, lying, decent man I ever met,’ ” said screenwriter Robert Schenkkan, who also wrote the play that bears the same title. “They wouldn’t be lying.”
Schenkkan and Cranston earned Tonys in 2014 for their stage collaboration, and it would have been as tempting as lifting a beagle by its droopy ears to simply re-create the heralded production.
Instead, with the prompting of director Jay Roach and producer Steven Spielberg, the movie takes full advantage of a more intimate medium, cutting out numerous phone conversations and monologues, while zooming in on emotionally wrenching moments, such as the one in the middle of the Republican National Convention when a vulnerable LBJ, convinced that the world is plotting against him, curls up in his hotel bed like a child who accidentally saw too much of “Rosemary’s Baby.”
“Steven said there was an opportunity with the camera to be in these most desperate places with Johnson where there was no hope, those moments of a personal meltdown,” said Roach, who had just finished directing Cranston to an Oscar nomination in “Trumbo.”
Cranston also had to prepare for his close-ups.
On stage, the actor took a minimalist approach in the dressing room, applying his own makeup and mixing a bit of gray dye into his slicked-back hair. For the film, he spent 2 1/2 hours in the makeup chair every day, having prosthetics glued onto his ears and adding lifts to his shoes.
Cranston got able support from a stellar cast, which includes Bradley Whitford, who has Humphrey’s nervous energy and clipped delivery down pat, and Anthony Mackie, who imagines King with a James Bond brand of cool.
Cranston also relied heavily on research, poring over the daunting stacks of books on his subject and spending two long nights locked inside the LBJ Presidential Library, searching for the key to unlock the man. It was during his second visit that he found it.
“There in the corner, right past the assassination display, was something I missed the first time,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of light on it. It was a letter from Jackie (Kennedy) to LBJ dated four days after the assassination. It said, ‘Dear Mr. President, I want to thank you for writing these lovely letters to my two children about their father and how much you loved and respected him. They don’t know it now, but they will appreciate it in the future.’
“Cranston continued: “So within days of taking on the most pressure-packed job in the world, this man sat down and wrote to two children when he had all these things that he needed to pay attention to. That spoke to me.”
