Ratings
The Daily: 3 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 78%
More on 'Ides of March'
IMDB
Official Website
Leave it to George Clooney to give us a presidential candidate who is not just anti-war, anti-God and anti-millionaire, but anti-internal-combustion as well. As a Pennsylvania governor locked in a tight contest for the Democratic nomination, Clooney’s Mike Morris is a green-thumbed liberal heartthrob, a politician who tells Charlie Rose without shame that he’d murder the man who trifled with his wife, then manfully accept the legal consequences — which, he says solemnly, should never include the death penalty, even if he happens to be willing to mete it out on his own time.
Why? Because, Morris tells Rose, “Society has to be better than the individual.”
“The Ides of March,” as directed by Clooney — who also wrote the script with frequent collaborator Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon (author of “Farragut North,” the play upon which the film is based) — is a movie about moral ambiguity drawn in old-fashioned straight lines. It’s a fable, but a vivid one — written and acted with precision, with a kind of procedural inevitability to it that belies the ingenuity with which Clooney brings his main character to ruin.
That man is Stephen Meyers, played by Ryan Gosling in what is becoming the actor’s signature register of swaggering, placid fury. Meyers is an up-and-coming political consultant, the best “media mind” in the country, according to the veteran campaign manager, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) — who, unfortunately, is working for the other guy, Senator Pullman, Morris’ anodyne primary opponent. Meyers’ own boss, Paul Zara, is a rumpled and ruthless operative himself — all paunch and weary cynicism, incarnated by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a hazy wreath of cigarette smoke and sleep deprivation.
Meyers has the professional’s facsimile of indifference down, and though the movie sets him up as an idealist, the reality is more complicated. He’s a powerful guy on the verge of a lot more power, a seducer down to his last few qualms — all that’s standing between him and the men he works for is embracing the fact that he too is damned. But he hasn’t yet, which is what enables him to wholeheartedly believe in Clooney’s Morris as not just a candidate but as a human, too.
That, of course, is the problem. “Mike Morris is a politician,” says Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), the opportunistic New York Times reporter who follows the Morris campaign. As she tells Meyers: “He will let you down sooner or later.”
Morris will, but he’s not the only one. What unfolds in “The Ides of March” is not one disillusionment but several, as Meyers is betrayed by everyone from a lovely young campaign intern (Rachel Evan Wood) — whose sexual availability he takes as a given, though the implications of that fact are initially lost on him — to Horowicz, who is quick to demonstrate how ephemeral qualities like loyalty are when people’s livelihoods are involved.
Gosling, no prince at the beginning of the film, registers each depressing revelation in this well-turned script by going slightly more dead in the eyes; his face, already withholding, approaches total blankness by the time the denouement arrives. What is at stake here, Clooney suggests, is not any particular ideal but the notion of ideals at all. Belief is a luxury, and a lever to be pulled if you happen to be naïve enough to expose it.
This is a lesson so old that it is its own archetype, but Meyers’ undoing is finely parceled out and exactingly gauged. It’s not quite “Michael Clayton,” in which Clooney played a similar man on the verge of darkness, to even more devastating effect. But it has that same crisp, mechanical feel, as Meyers spends most of the film one step behind his tormenters — only to end up ahead, at the cost of who he used to be.
The Daily: 3 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 78%
More on 'Ides of March'
IMDB
Official Website
Leave it to George Clooney to give us a presidential candidate who is not just anti-war, anti-God and anti-millionaire, but anti-internal-combustion as well. As a Pennsylvania governor locked in a tight contest for the Democratic nomination, Clooney’s Mike Morris is a green-thumbed liberal heartthrob, a politician who tells Charlie Rose without shame that he’d murder the man who trifled with his wife, then manfully accept the legal consequences — which, he says solemnly, should never include the death penalty, even if he happens to be willing to mete it out on his own time.
Why? Because, Morris tells Rose, “Society has to be better than the individual.”
“The Ides of March,” as directed by Clooney — who also wrote the script with frequent collaborator Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon (author of “Farragut North,” the play upon which the film is based) — is a movie about moral ambiguity drawn in old-fashioned straight lines. It’s a fable, but a vivid one — written and acted with precision, with a kind of procedural inevitability to it that belies the ingenuity with which Clooney brings his main character to ruin.
That man is Stephen Meyers, played by Ryan Gosling in what is becoming the actor’s signature register of swaggering, placid fury. Meyers is an up-and-coming political consultant, the best “media mind” in the country, according to the veteran campaign manager, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) — who, unfortunately, is working for the other guy, Senator Pullman, Morris’ anodyne primary opponent. Meyers’ own boss, Paul Zara, is a rumpled and ruthless operative himself — all paunch and weary cynicism, incarnated by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a hazy wreath of cigarette smoke and sleep deprivation.
Meyers has the professional’s facsimile of indifference down, and though the movie sets him up as an idealist, the reality is more complicated. He’s a powerful guy on the verge of a lot more power, a seducer down to his last few qualms — all that’s standing between him and the men he works for is embracing the fact that he too is damned. But he hasn’t yet, which is what enables him to wholeheartedly believe in Clooney’s Morris as not just a candidate but as a human, too.
That, of course, is the problem. “Mike Morris is a politician,” says Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), the opportunistic New York Times reporter who follows the Morris campaign. As she tells Meyers: “He will let you down sooner or later.”
Morris will, but he’s not the only one. What unfolds in “The Ides of March” is not one disillusionment but several, as Meyers is betrayed by everyone from a lovely young campaign intern (Rachel Evan Wood) — whose sexual availability he takes as a given, though the implications of that fact are initially lost on him — to Horowicz, who is quick to demonstrate how ephemeral qualities like loyalty are when people’s livelihoods are involved.
Gosling, no prince at the beginning of the film, registers each depressing revelation in this well-turned script by going slightly more dead in the eyes; his face, already withholding, approaches total blankness by the time the denouement arrives. What is at stake here, Clooney suggests, is not any particular ideal but the notion of ideals at all. Belief is a luxury, and a lever to be pulled if you happen to be naïve enough to expose it.
This is a lesson so old that it is its own archetype, but Meyers’ undoing is finely parceled out and exactingly gauged. It’s not quite “Michael Clayton,” in which Clooney played a similar man on the verge of darkness, to even more devastating effect. But it has that same crisp, mechanical feel, as Meyers spends most of the film one step behind his tormenters — only to end up ahead, at the cost of who he used to be.
