Clooney goes very dark in Ides of March

(Many apologies for the long delay in posting new reviews. I had a good excuse: I got married! So now that the wedding is over, I will once again start reviewing films again, maybe even with Mrs. Movie Critic.)


The Ides of March is so bleak and despairing that I don’t think voters are ready to stomach it. Its main character begins the film with many values, and ends it with none whatsoever. The film arrives to that appalling conclusion because that’s the reality of modern politics.

I knew this film was venturing down a gloomy road when it began with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” a song that was last heard on film before nuclear bombs lit up Doomsday in Dr. Strangelove. That’s a dire warning indeed.

This isn’t one of those feel-good movies that will “get out the vote.” Recall Swing Vote from 2008, that quirky satire about “every vote counts”? That was a picnic in the park compared to this parade of political supervillains and their many underlings. No, here your vote is worthless because, the film suggests, an election battle is waged long before the voting booth ever opens. How true that is I will let you decide, but I don’t think you’ll be looking forward to next year’s presidential election after witnessing this dark wonder.

The film follows presidential candidate Mike Morris, an ambitious governor fighting with a prickly foe in the Ohio democratic primary. Every movement of the Morris campaign is planned by the calculating, though sheepishly worrisome, Paul Zara (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and his overzealous staffer Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling). I liked some of the film’s smaller details, like how the staffers don’t ever watch news events of their candidate simply because they’re planning the next speech during the current one. Or how the offices are crammed with enough political history and props that they’ll make the pause button very useful for the DVD release.

The plot mainly focuses on Stephen, who is handsome and determined, though also naïve about the risks of sinking your life into politics. Stephen is a dangerous opponent on the campaign trail, so dangerous that the other candidate tries to poach him from Team Morris. It doesn’t work, but the meeting sends reverberations through both campaigns.

I didn’t entirely believe the importance of this meeting, but the movie throws an awful lot of weight behind it. Apparently, it’s wrong for two high-level staffers from opposing teams to meet and discuss the campaign. Baseball teams do it, so I don’t really see the problem. Later it comes up that maybe Stephen wasn’t loyal to his candidate, but I would counter that Stephen didn’t take the job offer so he was loyal after all. In any case, this single meeting factors into the plot in ways that aren’t totally sound. It’s a minor annoyance, but one the film continuously revisits. The scene does involve the great Paul Giamatti at his most flatulent and egocentric, which is always a plus.

Later, after a reporter gets wind of a damaging story, Stephen has to defend his actions to the press as well as to his bosses, who are quick to throw him under the campaign bus and speed out to the next primary state. At this point, Gov. Morris (George Clooney) is an honorable candidate, someone most voters would respect if not vote for. But what Stephen does is the unthinkable: he brings a good candidate to the very edge of treachery and then pushes him in.

Stephen does this when he finds out that the good governor has some buried secrets. That is Stephen’s backdoor entrance back into the Morris campaign. In the real world they would call that blackmail, but in politics it’s called leverage. Of course, there’s more to it that I’m not including: bureaucratic horse-trading, shady cabinet appointments, leaked media stories, dirty politics and questionable money donations. The film really hits most of the highlights when it comes to political ethics on the campaign trail.

Clooney stars in, but also directs, Ides of March, which is a reference to the assassination of Julius Cesar. Clooney finds the movie’s theme in the failure of Morris’ principles. Politicians by themselves are mostly honest men and women, but put them in an election surrounded by a staff that will do anything to win and it will bring out the worst in a candidate. It provides a scary scenario: there’s no such thing as a good president because they all had to campaign to get the title.

Now, a word on the political leanings of this movie: Clooney, a prominent democrat and supporter of President Obama, could have easily made this film about the GOP, which would rather nominate Mayor McCheese than stand behind one of its rotating frontrunners. But he didn’t do that. He let these politicians be democrats — as they were in Farragut North, the Beau Willimon play that the movie is based upon — and by doing so he’s allowed Ides to be a message movie as opposed to a public bashing on the other guys. It must have stung Clooney to beat up on his own party so close to an election, but he does it because he thinks the message — campaigning drains the soul from a candidate — is of vital importance.

I was mighty impressed with Ides of March, but I’ll admit it terrified me, especially when you start thinking about these kinds of games being played right now in the race for the White House. Even if the movie is making up 80 percent of it, that’s still 20 percent rooted in truth. Scary stuff.

The film is marvelously acted, with great performances by Gosling, Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood, who plays a low-level staffer with line after line of witty and seductive dialogue. The movie also employs some rather neat, but very simple, camera tricks, including one involving an SUV and a fired campaign manager, and then another with a vibrating cell phone that produces some chills in this political thriller. Above all, though, it’s Clooney as director who knocks this one out of the park. He understood the material and had fun exploiting all the nuances of the script.

By the time the Gosling character steps into the darkness — like Anakin turning into Darth Vader — Clooney has embraced the political horror enough to give us a payoff worthy of material this dark.