The Ides of March

The Ides of March 2011 (101 minutes) directed by George Clooney and written by Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon; based on Willimon’s 2008 play Farragut North.

What happened after attorney Michael Clayton exposed the bad guys—including his own law firm and their main client, a major agrochemical corporation—and rode off in a Manhattan taxi looking for the next poker game?

Judging from the movie The Ides of March, he left town, changed his name to Mike Morris, went into politics and became a United States senator from Pennsylvania running for president.

In The Ides of March, presidential candidate Senator Mike Morris (George Clooney) is a charismatic Democrat and his candid and heartfelt-to-the-point-of-tear-inducing social, political and philosophical views clearly have a broad appeal, not unlike a certain widely celebrated and equally despised incumbent.

Too bad this is all for television.

The ‘politics’ here have nothing to do with political philosophy, the wonky art of guiding government or government policy behind the grand pronouncements, or even fixing potholes. This is not Morris’ fault, it is just the way the game is played—and what a devious poker game this turns out to be, according to the movie.

It’s not ‘the economy, stupid’; it’s winning the deal. It is winning and keeping the deal in a running poker game in which winning means a place at the exclusive big stakes table which is a job in the White House, and losing, a return to a political consulting gig on K Street for another shot later. The dealer calls the shots.

It’s a poker game. All the other stuff takes care of itself, eventually.

As it turns out, politics also is about character, about people’s personalities and personal relationships. Some people—like twenty-year-old interns—do the damnedest things; some you could just kill—or understand at least why someone might seriously consider doing so. People politics is what this film is about.

Clooney is Clooney: other reviewers rightly have noted that his background appearance on political posters and television would have sufficed. Ryan Gosling plays the lead as Stephen Meyers, the chief assistant to Morris’ campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

But the wheels this film runs on are the two campaign managers: Hoffman’s Zara and Paul Giamatti’s Tom Duffy, campaign manager for Morris’ main presidential primary rival Senator Ted Pullman, and their best made plans.

From their first evenly matched eyeball-to-eyeball, these two crafty stagers make this picture worth seeing. Giamatti is always entertaining in his antic-frantic, nervous Norvis or moustache twirling Snidely Whiplash modes, but here he is fine-tuned as a seasoned political operative. Hoffman does no less. It’s almost as though these perfectly matched pros revel in showing each other how it is done, both in character and as actors.

            Also of note is Marisa Tomei as Ida Horowicz, a nasal and toothy national political reporter for The New York Times, flashing her front teeth Clooney-style in a way that feels as though meant to parody someone, and the often unsung but always good Jeffrey Wright. 

Wright, in another of his fine character roles, plays Senator Thompson, a horse-dealing senator with political ambition prudently tailored to the possible (vice president, secretary of state, rather than president) and a big chunk of delegates to trade.

The above-referenced twenty-year-old Morris intern Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood) plays the wild card. Her role is least convincing, though she—and Gosling—may be a bit outgunned here among this outstanding cast.

Although Gosling wins the deal at the poker table by the end of the movie and apparently is on track for big things to follow, one does not get the sense that he has come into his own as did Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather. He seems more a legend in his own mind than a serious contender.

This movie is a bit of a paradox, in that the strong characters that carry the drama do not drive the action—best made plans gang aft agley... It is not near as good a thriller as Michael Clayton (2007), starring Clooney and written and directed by Tony Gilroy, nor does it have the grace and poetry of Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).

But it’s not that bad.

The key to this movie is the nobodies. In the early 1920s, a group of gifted and intelligent political figures did not think that a rough and unsophisticated hack running their party was worth worrying about.

Like Meyers in The Ides of March, the Georgian Iosif Djugashvili who renamed himself Stalin did not give most of them the chance to think twice.

The one who fucked you may not be the bimbo at all.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uha0XfGBdMw