George Clooney’s fourth film as director is The Ides of March, a modern political
drama with the look, tone and score of a thriller. It features tense conversations
between men in suits, always attempting to position themselves with their
words, scheming, shifting, and weighing the consequences of each word and every
thought. It tells us that good people and bad people alike get sucked into the
gamesmanship that is running for public office until the difference between the
two is next to nonexistent. There are only politicians.
Centered on a high level campaigner (Ryan Gosling), the film
shows us the behind-the-scenes machinations of a run in a presidential primary.
This man is an idealist and a pragmatist. He believes in his cause and he
believes in his candidate (George Clooney), a sitting governor. He reports to
the candidate’s campaign manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a weary and shrewd
man who values loyalty above all else. Loyalty to ideology or even to coworkers
is not the kind of loyalty he holds in such high esteem. No, he considers
loyalty to the campaign the end all be all of political life.
His counterpart (Paul Giamatti) in the campaign of the main
competition is similarly gruff and slimy, ready to throw anyone under any bus.
He makes decisions that ruin lives and we’re supposed to dislike him. But what
about our guys? They wouldn’t be so
cold, would they? Greedy negotiations with a Senator who has dropped out of the
race (Jeffrey Wright) and a brewing scandal involving a pretty young intern
(Evan Rachel Wood) try the moral mettle of the protagonist and throw harsh
light onto the dirty deeds that go on in dark backroom deals. True to its
namesake, The Ides of March contains
plenty of backstabbing. It’s a drama of disillusionment.
The film has a kind of frostbitten cynicism. It’s covered in
impressive craggy displays of wounded chilliness, but scrape them away and
what’s underneath is stale. It’s all too easy to point at politics and
politicians and issue easy scorn. “They’re all nice guys,” says a reporter, a
small role played by Marisa Tomei, “but they’ll always disappoint you.” This is
an awfully easy thesis to prove, and the film sets out to prove it well. The oldness
and obviousness of this sentiment doesn’t make the film less relevant, just
less inherently compelling, especially when there is an almost uncanny-valley
level of disregard for real-world political references. This is a film that has
just enough in common with our current situations (and a few select pundit
cameos) that everything it doesn’t address, even off-handedly, creates a
distancing effect. We don’t even get to meet the competition, or even anyone
from the other party. In our world, campaigns are a noisy buzz machine surrounded
by gossip and megaphones. Here, things are strangely isolated for narrative and
thematic simplicity.
It’s a good thing, then, that the performances make up for
the void left by such thematic posing. Gosling is a bit of a blank here, a
functionary who fills the role of increasingly disenchanted political
operative. But the characters that surround him are terrifically complicated,
lived-in performances from a collection of some of our greatest character
actors. Clooney has the right combination of movie-star looks and gravitas of
presence to look like a presidential candidate. He also has the depth in his
eyes to play a man who can carry deep secrets without ever once letting on the
extent of them. As the operatives and politicians that move along the plot,
Hoffman, Giamatti, and Wright are pitch-perfect jargon machines that open up to
reveal cold personal politics that are chilling in their icy logic of naked
careerism.
Each character gets a moment when they can plunk down in the
middle of a scene and deliver the kind of monologue that causes my ears to
prick up, the better to hear every word. These are fine moments superbly
performed, moments that betray the film’s origins as Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North. Adapted by Willimon,
along with Clooney and Grant Heslov, The
Ides of March fits in comfortably with Clooney’s other directorial efforts.
Like the paranoid showbiz thriller Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind, the black and white docudrama Good Night and Good Luck, and the mothballed screwball comedy Leatherheads, this latest film has a
stylistic and thematic connection with the past. Like the cynical political
films of the 70’s – Michael Ritchie’s The
Candidate, Robert Altman’s Nashville –
Ides marches to its own glum drum.
What it lacks is the same sense of vibrancy, of discovery, of a looseness and
reality to its disgruntled surprises. It ticks along with wonderful
performances and tense moments, but it never really gathers the pessimistic
reality it aims to accrue. When the film ended, though I had been entertained
and distracted, I was still waiting to be told something that would surprise
me.
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