Review of The Ides of March (2011) by Bennington13 — 29 Oct 2011

The Ides of March zeroes in on the rise and fall of Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), media relations manager for the campaign of presidential hopeful Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney). Although.

Morris is a nominally a Democrat, his political allegiance is immaterial. The film's core question is whether changing the person at the top makes any difference - is Morris a paradigm shifting candidate.

You can believe in, or is he just the same old wolf in particularly well tailored sheep's clothing? The source material Beau Williams' 2008 play Farragut North named after a metro station which serves K Street, the dark heart of Washington DC's political lobbying industry, and loosely based on Howard Dean's bid for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination. It's no small irony (on several levels) that Williams, who worked with Clooney to adapt his own play, himself later worked as a press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign. Initially Ides feels overwhelmingly like a campaign trailer for Clooney's own run for elected office (despite numerous denials both before and after the release of Ides that he harbours any kind of political ambition). It's hard not to interpret Ides as a 2012 warm-up ahead for Obama, if not Clooney when it's so liberally peppered with Vote Morris campaign materials that so ostentatiously mimic Obama's 2008 posters, right down to the pithy one-word slogans. Rousing stump speeches are strewn across the film: clarion calls for clean power, ending American dependence on oil and restoring the US to it's rightful.

Position as world leader could all be drawn from Democratic Campaigning 101. Interestingly, with hindsight, the film even appears to keep a distance between the feel good flag waving of Morris' public campaign,and the cynical manoeuvrings taking place behind the scenes. It's only a third of the way in, once the film starts to mine a rich vein of cynicism that it becomes clear that this is no rabble rousing, feel good cheerleading effort. After initial scenes of bonhomie and even a whiff of romance, the rug is swiftly pulled out from under the audience as Morris and his public campaign move offscreen, becoming a catalyst rather than a locus for the film's backroom action.Instead, rival campaign managers, Paul Giamatti and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are given free rein to chew up the scenery whenever they appear on screen, even as they disabuse us of any lingering belief we might naively hold in the fairness of a democratic system. However, there's no denying that it's Gosling's sensational turn which gives the film its centre of gravity.His metamorphosis from a superficially cynical but naive believer, to a deadened manipulator.

(warning: pretentious film analysis ahead) that serves as a depressingly fitting metaphor for modern Western political democracy. It's a powerhouse performance, and his transformation from sleepy eyed.

Charmer to dead eyed power broker can be justly compared to Al Pacino's rise and fall and rise in The Godfather (the final shot of Ides is eerily reminiscent of Pacino's final blank eyed expression in Coppola's classic). Gosling deploys his trademark internalised style to devastating effect, a muted performance that makes his Bambi eyed response when his house of cards starts tumbling down all the more painful to watch. For all it's subtlety, it's at least as layered as some of the more bombastic performances, adorned with Obama-esque body language and fleeting twitches in facial expression. But what really differentiates Ides from the (many) politically inspired films before it is the refusal to sugar the pill. Visually Ides doffs its cap to the stoic investigative and campaigning films of the Seventies, as the colours and sets reflect the growing bleakness of the films events (the end credits look as though they belong to a film starring Warren Beatty or Gene Hackman in their heyday). But by.

Eschewing the paranoia of films like Nixon or The Parallax View, and the cynical humour of Primary Colours, Wag the Dog or Bulworth, Ides delivers an even bigger sucker punch.

Ides strips away the usual Hollywood figleaves to expose the dirty reality of the complicated mind games being played in pursuit of dubious ideals (one of the many quandaries of the film being whether ugly wrongs can be overlooked in the name of what is right). Even more refreshingly, it refuses to spoonfeed moviegoers the narratively convenient answers to such questions. Go for the performances and.

Clooney's bleakly assured direction, but prepare to have the curtain pulled back to reveal something very ugly - you definitely won't be in Kansas any more.