George Clooney’s political drama The Ides of March is about a Democratic primary campaign unfolding in the key state of Ohio, in an atmosphere heavy with fratricidal betrayal behind the scenes. Clooney directs, and co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, author of the original stage play, Farragut North. It sticks to the traditional Hollywood supposition that the Democrats are the ones with ideals ripe for dramatic disintegration. Republicans are presumably utterly lost from the outset.
The movie is slower, darker and more cynical than anything Aaron Sorkin would write, and West Wing addicts might well find this a little bit adagio compared with the galloping allegro of Sorkin’s rat-a-tat style. Some of the dialogue, especially put into the mouth of Marisa Tomei’s journalist, is a little too obviously expository. But it is intelligently acted and directed, an involving story with a distinctive, bleak and unexpectedly powerful payoff.
Clooney has a semi-cameo as the candidate himself, Governor Mike Morris, a role in which he comports himself with presidential smoothness, broken only by a dark confrontation at the end. But the star is Ryan Gosling, excellent in the role of Stephen Meyers, Morris’s smart and idealistic press aide, working the room like a young maestro.
Yet Stephen’s is the sort of idea-lism that turns out to be thin-skinned and highly strung, in spite of the apparent unflappable competence that so impresses both his own boss, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and his enemy’s PR chief, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti). Duffy makes secret overtures to him, and so does gorgeous intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), factors that combine to play on Stephen’s fatal weaknesses: anger and pride.
This is a stage adaptation, and it occasionally looks a little stagy; audiences might also feel that a key revelation about Molly is insufficiently worked out in dramatic terms. But the more subdued pace and style of Clooney’s film are perhaps realer than Sorkin’s fireworks, closer to the grind and drear that make up most political campaigning.
I was reminded of a line in Joe Klein’s Primary Colors: the sight of the tatty campaign war room makes the adviser depressed and yet comforted at the same time. The movie shows a young idealist at the point of turning sour; it shows how it is his very high-mindedness that is so dangerous. There is a kind of assassination, a funeral oration and someone with blood on his hands. The Ides of March is a brutal demonstration of the action of the strong upon the weak. It’s a high-IQ film, with a really good lead performance from Gosling. —