Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/4/11
George Clooney is a fascinating
figure, one of the few genuine movie stars ever to sincerely speak his
mind on complex political matters in the public forum (no, reflexive support
for a few fringe causes is not the same thing). Of course, one of
the reasons Clooney remains a movie star despite a checkered box office
record is that he IS so fascinating: he looks and plays the role
of Movie Star better than just about anybody working today, and his artistic
output would look a lot more at home in the 70’s heyday of Paul Newman
than it does in our Transformer-dominated movie landscape. One way
he’s stayed on top is that early on in his career he began to court Moguldom:
he and his assorted producing partners (most notably Steven Soderberg and
Grant Heslov) are major players in the indie scene, and he himself has
done double duty a few times as actor and director. There’s been
one notable success amongst his four films as director: the Oscar-nominated
Good Night, and Good Luck, but the other three have been disappointments,
most notably his latest, The Ides of March. Like the mediocre
comedies Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Leatherheads,
Ides seems to feel like it has something desperately important to say,
it’s just hard to pin down exactly what it is. Ides’ superficial
point is easy enough to make out: politics are rotten to the core.
But since the film delivers that most obvious and oft-repeated of messages
wrapped in an utterly unlikable and unrelatable story as though it had
raced across the vast desert to deliver the news before it was too late,
I can’t help but ask, “Is that it?”
Pennsylvania Governor Mike
Norris (George Clooney) is an unlikely contender for the Democratic Presidential
nomination. For one thing, he’s an outspoken agnostic. For
another, just about everything he says makes sense and sounds like good
policy. But he’s running neck and neck with a more traditional candidate
as the race rounds the home stretch with the pivotal Ohio primary.
His campaign is run by veteran Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the
brash youngster Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), who professes a True Belief
in Norris being the only man for the job. But in between prepping
his candidate for debates and leaking just the right stories to beat reporter
Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), he finds time to first flirt and then sleep
with intern Molly Sterns (Evan Rachel Wood). Stephen receives a surprise
call from Paul’s counterpart in the enemy camp, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti),
who asks for a one-on-one meeting. Against his better judgment, he
agrees, and when Tom tries to hire him away, he says no and doesn’t tell
Paul until some of the strategy he learned at the meeting is successfully
used against Norris. By then, things have begun to spiral out of
control: Stephen’s position in the campaign is threatened just as
an explosive revelation about the Governor falls into his lap. Just
what will he do with a secret that could destroy the man he’s been fighting
to elect?
Herein lies the twofold problem
with The Ides of March: as played by Gosling, I never bought
Stephen as anything other than another in a long line of slick Washington
operators, and I didn’t find the secret to be anything that would make
me less likely to vote for Norris. Let’s be honest, if we’re waiting
for a Great Man whose moral hands are clean, we’d still be waiting throughout
the whole of recorded history, and if I ever had a chance to vote for a
guy selling the kind of straight, smart talk the Governor espouses in the
movie, I’d need to hear that he’d murdered someone in cold blood before
I’d even begin to reconsider my choice (and even then, probably not:
what President HASN’T killed a bunch of Americans with the stroke of a
pen for his own cynical political advantage?). Furthermore, it’s
hard to say if the movie even expects me to feel these things: I
can imagine an alternate reading of what we see where we’re to take Stephen
as a charlatan from the getgo and the Governor as a hero with feet of clay.
It (or Gosling and Clooney, both fine actors to be sure) just won’t let
me inside either man to know for certain who they are, and without that
ability, Ides’ plot boils down to just a bunch of crappy stuff that
happened. Sure, Molly’s story is sad, but she certainly spends both
the first reel of the movie and untold time before it begins throwing herself
with Lewinskyesque determination at every powerful man whose path she crosses.
And if Stephen was out of a job, well, so are a lot of people.
Clooney, pal of Presidents
that he is, has seen a lot more of the kind of behavior The Ides of
March depicts than most of us, but we’ve certainly all imagined enough
of it that watching his inside operators double-and-triple-cross each other
comes as no surprise. And since there’s never anything at stake other
than their jobs, none of the maneuvering was clever enough to engage me.
I certainly believed in this political world, Hoffman and Giamatti in particular
give the sense that they’ve been doing this since we were all in short
pants, and Tomei memorably wears her heartlessness on her sleeve.
Gregory Itzin, who so skillfully personified every wrong with the modern
politician as 24’s evil President, has a wonderful scene at a funeral
late in the film, and Jeffery Wright is so spot-on as a former candidate
whose support Norris needs that he could literally just walk right onto
CNN and start babbling idiocy tomorrow.
But aside from the acting,
The Ides of March is a disappointment on just about every level.
Even if you take its muddy indictment of all things political with the
urgency it demands, you’re left with a movie where uniformly unlikable
characters betray each other for a chance for one of them to maybe be President.
And I’m curious what Clooney expects me to do with the information he feels
he’s revealing: despise every single political insider he’s ever
met? Been there, done that. |
