All The Way

Bryan Cranston reprises his 2014 Tony Award-winning performance as the "accidental president" in Jay Roach's biopic "All The Way," adapted by Robert Schenkkan from his play with the same title.

The stellar Cranston disappears into LBJ, exactly evoking President Lyndon B. Johnson's hard-drinking drawl and crude expressions, aided by two hours of makeup, as related in the "Becoming LBJ" Blu-ray extra. The creative team added prosthetic ears, nose, chin, cheeks, pores and capillaries, along with a receding hairline and thinned hair, plus two inch shoe lifts and suits that allowed "some slack for my nutsack" (Cranston said the president actually said that to his tailor). He also notes that the new president asked for different shoes so he wouldn't look like a "Dago undertaker."

The narrative follows one year in his life, from his taking over after JFK's assassination to his passage of 1964's Civil Rights Act, encouraged by his close confidante Hubert Humphrey (unrecognizable Bradley Whitford). A Southerner himself, LBJ had to battle his fellow Dixiecrats (whom he called "redneck goons" after Strom Thurmond called Blacks "Congolese savages"), many supporters of Jim Crow laws, to overturn "100 years of carefully crafted social and political measures to oppress African-Americans."

Lady Bird (Melissa Leo) stays strong for her husband, especially post-assassination, noting that Jackie Kennedy won't change her blood-splatted clothes so Americans can see what happened, despite his brusque manner.

"My lord, what Rose Kennedy has been through," he tells his wife after she tells him she's made the call. Sadly, though, he kept unscrupulous J. Edgar Hoover (Stephen Root) as a trusted advisor too, who surveyed MLK's (here, an excellent Andrew Mackie) every movement (and called him a "sex-mad preacher-adulterer") while the president tried to work with him at the same time.

The featurettes interview historians and activists such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Andrew Young, who note that LBJ could relate to MLK's struggle since he also knew the "humiliation and degradation of being poor himself" and having the ability to do something about it.

Whereas Dr. King took his "drama to the streets," Johnson was able to work inside the legislation during this volatile "Freedom Summer."

Mackie notes that King brought "gold, rhetorical beauty, a vocabulary to measure the gulf between ideals and reality."

"He lifted the veil," says Mackie.

The HBO film was nominated for eight Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding TV movie and acting nominations for Cranston and Leo.

One notes that Bill Moyers said that LBJ was "eleven of the most interesting people I know." He was "kind, mean, funny, cold, embracing, generous, and stingy -- all emotions on the human spectrum. He was interesting, and lit up a room." But he never expected to be president.

Despite his flaws, LBJ, in the capable hands of Cranston, emerges as perhaps the only man, a "Southern president to drag the south of the past," but at the cost of losing that region to the Republicans, where it remains today. These "racial relationships," notes one, "are being fought again."

"All The Way"
Blu-ray
$14.86
http://www.hbo.com/movies/all-the-way