At heart, The Ides of March is nothing more than a half-baked morality play about the corruptibility of power in politics. The writers, including director-actor George Clooney (The American) and playwright Beau Willimon, offer nothing new. The script explores themes that have already been thought through in greater detail in Mike Nichols’ much funnier 1998 film adaptation of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors and in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
That’s the bad news. The good news? The slick, sleek exterior around which this lame political exposé has been wrapped is compelling stuff.
Clooney has assembled an impressive cast and equally impressive crew, all of whom execute commendably. Ryan Gosling (Drive) stars as a young, idealistic media genius charged with handling the presidential campaign of Gov. Mike Morris (Clooney) leading into the Ohio primaries, Morris being the Obama stand-in of the movie.
Gosling’s character, predictably, suffers from a loss of faith and moral crisis when it is revealed Morris isn’t the squeaky clean, Christ-like figure he appears to be. Exactly why Morris makes for such a great candidate and person is never really explained, though Clooney handles his role’s duality quite well.
Gosling, working from a rather predictable character arc, does a good-to-great job as the impressionable but charming young lad, handling himself well in front of the much more experienced Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Jack Goes Boating) and Paul Giamatti (Win Win).
Hoffman and Giamatti, as two rival, conniving and equally paranoid campaign managers, are both excellent, as usual. It is, however, disappointing that the movie never actually features a head-on confrontation between the two acting giants.
All of this is captured beautifully on film by Clooney and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, and accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s (The Tree of Life) atmospheric riff on patriotic music and moody jazz.
The stellar cast and production values may have been enough to keep the movie going if Clooney and his co-writers weren’t so assured of the depth and uniqueness of their insight.
Unfortunately, the movie frequently devolves into pointed monologues on power and trust or extremely heavy-handed shots involving American flags.
The Ides of March has a surprising amount of profanity. It’s a little off-putting — as if the writers gleefully inserted every f- and s-bomb (especially following televised debates) to highlight the moral depravity and unctuousness of those highfalutin political types.
Perhaps the biggest issue with The Ides of March is its timing: We’re already in the cynical, dysphoric, post-“Yes we can” era. Some Obama-like presidential candidate with secret, deep-rooted hypocrisies doesn’t strike audiences as novel or interesting anymore — it’s just business as usual.
VERDICT: Effective only on a dramatic level, The Ides of March is a disappointingly shallow meditation on corruption and politics.
chzhang@umdbk.com
