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Clooney has mastered the art of picking interesting films within the genres he attempts. Pitt once said that no one he knew had figured out the Hollywood game better than Clooney in terms of doing the right commercial films, the right critical favorites and so on.
He’s not much of an actor but he’s got a deep understanding of what’s in his wheelhouse and what’s not and that’s why he’s consistently striking the right balance. I’m not a big fan of all those movies but I also wouldn’t argue against them to a great degree.
Actually I just recently caught up with The American and that could have been a stale film but it’s quite effective.
Primary Suspect
“The Ides of March.”
by Anthony Lane October 10, 2011
In his new film, “The Ides of March,” George Clooney plays Governor Mike Morris, a Presidential hopeful. He’s a Democrat, that being Clooney’s flavor of choice, although, as the movie progressed, I was slowly gripped by the urge to see him cast as a Republican. The G.O.P. is absent from the movie, as if it were something that could be wished away, but, when you inspect Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman, the public sheen that they project—sculpted, spotless, and not quite of this world—seems awfully close to Clooney’s affable perfection. The gulf between him and them, in ideology, may be vast, but it’s easily bridged: when the next TV debate comes along, just reach for your remote, and hit mute.
Most of the action unfolds in Ohio, where Morris is running in a Presidential primary. He has a squad of staffers, headed by his keen pup of a press spokesman, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), who has a lean and hungry look, and the shaggier, full-bellied figure of Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman)—Morris’s campaign manager, and the human equivalent of a smoke-filled room. The cinematography, by Phedon Papamichael, wants nothing to do with blue skies, preferring the heavens above to be as gray as the slush underfoot. There’s a terrific shot of Zara getting into the Governor’s S.U.V., a hulking black hearse, which has backed into an alley in Cincinnati. Inside, and unheard by us, Zara talks to Morris, then climbs out and lights a cigarette, while the car pulls away. The whole scene, with its twin aromas of the shambolic and the cabalistic, has an honest political stink.
Morris’s opponent is named Pullman (Michael Mantell), but we hardly notice the guy. What matters is his team, led by Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), Zara’s opposite number, and there can’t be a moviegoer who won’t thrill to the early sight of Giamatti and Hoffman, eying each other backstage at the end of a candidates’ debate. Two strong actors, at the summit of their game, getting ready to square off: it’s like watching Nadal and Federer, minus the muscle tone, knocking up for a couple of minutes before the first serve. The streak of sportiveness is there in Gosling’s character, too, when he declares, “This is the big leagues. It’s mean. When you make a mistake, you lose the right to play.” Yet Myers is less ludic than his partners in the game, who’ve seen it all before; he behaves like someone seeing it for the first time, and his speech is larded with imperatives. “He has to win,” he says of his boss, and, “I have to believe in the cause.” In short, he clings to what Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), a Times reporter, and almost a buddy of his, derides as “all this ‘take back the country’ nonsense.” Morris himself uses the same phrase, in a speech near the end, and, again, you can’t help thinking, Wrong side. These fellows should be sipping with the Tea Party.
“The Ides of March” is directed by Clooney, who wrote the script with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, basing it on “Farragut North,” Willimon’s original play. In the theatre, apparently, we never saw the Governor; he was the sun king around whom people spun, but he shone offstage, and I half wish that Clooney had borrowed the conceit for the film. He could have modelled himself on the six-foot rabbit in “Harvey”—glimpsed only in portrait form, but ceaselessly mooned over by his chief admirer. The quirk of this movie is that, for all its pretensions to topical soothsaying and its sombre machinations of plot, it remains, in essence, a love story. True, Myers has a fling with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a twenty-year-old intern on the campaign, who sashays up to his desk with the word “Trouble” more or less flashing in pink neon over her head, but what they share is witheringly loveless. When a caller asks who is with him in his hotel room, he replies, “Nobody. Cleaning lady.” But consider them having sex: Stearns beneath, Myers on top, and his face tilted sideways, gazing at Morris on TV. On the back of the Governor’s campaign bus is the slogan “I Like Mike,” but Myers is done with mere liking. Steve Loves Mike. He loves him in the same self-angering way that Cassius, I imagine, used to worship Caesar, before the latter swelled into a god. There are small shimmers of gay longing on display here—Myers getting “all goosebumpy,” as Horowicz points out, at the very thought of Morris, or tearing up slightly as he watches his boss breeze through a Q.&A.—but further than that the movie fears to tread.
As if to reinforce that shyness, all the twists are straight. The Governor, more to Myers’s astonishment than to ours, turns out to have feet of clay. Well, not feet. Let’s just say that portions of him are proved to be clay-based. I wondered whether Myers, given his devotion to Morris, would take the ultimate rap for him, but no: Cassius turns, hates, and bites, and we are ushered into a seedy subplot whose crevices I cannot reveal, although it feels no more believable for being so grim. Clooney is famed as a prankster, and his best performances, in films like “Out of Sight,” are strewn with smiles, so it came as a shock to realize how unfunny “The Ides of March” is—how solidly it takes its cue from the stony and self-important Myers. I am as simple a sucker as anyone for depictions of dark deeds in high places, and I will cozy up to “The Parallax View,” say, whenever it shows on TV. Likewise, late in “The Ides of March,” the sequence in which Myers and Morris, not wanting to be disturbed, meet and trade threats in a hotel kitchen after dark, surrounded with steelware, rings as sharp as a filleting knife. But does it ring true? The fact remains that, over time, such paranoid accounts of political conduct grow less convincing than their comic counterparts. For a wise, conspiracy-free insight into those who thirst for office, try “The Great McGinty,” directed by Preston Sturges, who would have taken one look at Myers and posed the questions that Clooney dodges throughout. How can “the best media mind in the country,” as Duffy calls Myers, also be such a rube? And what about Stearns? The second half of the film presents her as a pure victim, so why, in the first half, was the lady such a vamp?
Clooney and company could have used Sturges—or, even better, Clifford Odets—when it came to rewrites. With all the betrayals and gassy ambitions swirling around here, we badly need dialogue to ignite the film, instead of which even the most aggressive spirits keep firing the dampest of lines. Zara: “My fucking blood pressure’s going through the goddam roof right now.” Duffy: “You stay in this business long enough, you’re gonna get jaded and cynical.” These phrases explain too much, like the patter of a crime series that has played too long on television. In so doing, they chime with Alexandre Desplat’s inoffensive score, which comes to its anticlimax as Myers and Stearns head off to a fateful appointment. They’re in his car, but, to judge by the music that envelops them, they might as well be riding an elevator.
To enter “The Ides of March” with lofty, Myers-like hopes, as I did, may not have been the smartest of plans. Still, it’s hard not to feel bruised with disappointment as the final credits roll, although the names listed there—which include Jeffrey Wright, in the role of a potent senator—offer some clue to what went awry. This film is full of great actors, but not enough people. The first image in the movie is that of a microphone and a halo of light, followed by Gosling’s face, and, from here on, entire swathes of the action are confined to closeups. Jennifer Ehle, who plays Morris’s wife, gets a single speaking scene, on the bus, with nothing visible below the level of her pearls. You can see what Clooney and Papamichael were aiming for: a shadow-hatched chamber piece, with men and women battling head to head. But this is meant to be politics, not a murder mystery, and, without more than a sprinkling of voters in the frame, and with even Morris’s campaign headquarters retaining a weird and orderly calm, the tale runs out of air.
When Robert Redford (another beautiful, liberal leading man, to whom, as with Clooney, rumors of genuine political activity were attached) appeared in “The Candidate,” in 1972, he inched toward a Clooney-like vision of political endeavor as, if not a necessary evil, at any rate an intolerable marketing exercise, one that could scoop the ideals and the zest from a man’s soul like crabmeat out of a claw. Catch the film again, however, and notice how the director, Michael Ritchie, packs the opening minutes, and most of what ensues, with regular, unstarry folk—those to whom the Redford character must appeal, and who could turn against him on a dime. “The Ides of March” is never that scruffy, or that alive. It takes its title, of course, from “Julius Caesar,” yet Shakespeare’s stage directions indicate “certain Commoners” who throng the start of the play, and we read of “the press”—the crowd, that is, not paparazzi—who jostle Caesar, and fill his ears, before the soothsayer utters his warning. In films, as in elections, extras are not an option. Without them, there’s no show
October 6, 2011
Movie Review | ‘The Ides of March’
Love and Loss on the Campaign Trail
By A. O. SCOTT
Mike Morris, the governor of Pennsylvania in “The Ides of March,” is an image of the liberal heart’s desire, and not only because he is played by George Clooney. Morris, who keeps his cool while inflaming the passions of Democratic primary voters, is a committed environmentalist and a forthright secularist who sidesteps questions about his faith by professing that his religion is the United States Constitution. He is against war and in favor of jobs, though the economy figures much less in his fictitious campaign than it will in the real one just around the corner.
In spite of Morris’s party affiliation and expressed positions — which are tailored to sound both vague and provocative — “The Ides of March” is not an ideological fairy tale. It is easy enough, while watching Morris in action, to substitute a different set of talking points and imagine the governor as a Republican dream candidate, smoothly defending low taxes and traditional values in the same seductive whisper. (Who is the right-wing George Clooney? Is Tom Selleck still available?)
But it is difficult, really, to connect this fable to the world it pretends to represent. Whatever happens in 2012, within either party or in the contest between them, it seems fair to say that quite a lot will be at stake. That is not the case in “The Ides of March,” which is less an allegory of the American political process than a busy, foggy, mildly entertaining antidote to it.
Morris, locked in a battle for the nomination with a colorless (and barely seen) Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell), is a bit of a cipher, or perhaps a symbol. He stands for an ideal of political charisma that the film, directed by Mr. Clooney and based on the play “Farragut North” by Beau Willimon, sets out to tarnish. And yet it seems doubtful, after more than a decade of scandal, acrimony and bare-knuckled media brawling, that this noble fantasy exists anywhere but in the minds of writers and actors who look back fondly on the glorious make-believe administrations of Henry Fonda and Martin Sheen.
“You stay in this business long enough, you get jaded and cynical,” one campaign staffer says to another. “The Ides of March” sets out first to rebut this bit of conventional wisdom, then to reaffirm it. It is in large part the tale of a professional politico’s loss of innocence. Not Morris’s, but that of Stephen Meyers, a young hotshot on the governor’s campaign staff who is played, with sad-eyed intensity, by Ryan Gosling. His prodigious talents are mentioned rather than shown, but we can accept that he is both a dazzling tactical brain and, what’s more, a true believer, working for Morris because he thinks Morris is the last, best hope for America.
Stephen’s boss is Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose counterpart in the Pullman campaign is Tom Duffy, played by Paul Giamatti. “The Ides of March” feels most alive and truest to its ostensible subject when these two soft-bellied, sharp-tongued schlubs do battle, with the angelic Stephen in the middle. Hovering around him like a crow circling carrion is Marisa Tomei as Ida Horowicz, a New York Times reporter who might be the only journalist covering the campaign or at least the only one with a speaking part in the movie. (Go team!)
But what political drama there is in this film — will Morris win the Ohio primary? Will his staff cut a deal with a vain and imperious North Carolina senator (Jeffrey Wright)? — is scaffolding rather than substance. As the Shakespearean title suggests, “The Ides of March” has loftier, less time-bound matters on its mind: the nature of honor, the price of loyalty, the ways that a man’s actions are a measure of his character.
These themes, swathed in Alexandre Desplat’s dark-hued score and Phedon Papamichael’s chocolate-and-burgundy cinematography, come into relief as Stephen encounters turbulence in his career and his personal life. He stumbles into a professional flirtation with Duffy, and almost simultaneously into some hot campaign sex with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a young woman who is — no points for guessing right — an intern. She also has a powerful daddy and a secret in her past that has the potential to send Stephen’s career and the Morris campaign into a tailspin.
Mr. Clooney handles the plot complications with elegant dexterity. As an actor, he works best in long, understated scenes that allow him to play with nuances of charm and menace, so it is not surprising that, as a director, he gives the rest of the cast room to work. But the parts of “The Ides of March” — quiet scenes between Mr. Gosling and Ms. Wood; swirling, Sorkinesque exchanges of banter; any time Ms. Tomei or Max Minghella (as a campaign worker grooming himself to be the next Stephen Meyers) are in the room — are greater than the whole.
Somehow, the film is missing both adrenaline and gravity, notwithstanding some frantic early moments and a late swerve toward tragedy. It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk. Powerful men often treat women as sexual playthings. Reporters do not always get things right. Politicians sometimes lie. If any of that sounds like news to you, then you may well find “The Ides of March” downright electrifying.
More likely, though, you will find it more comforting than inspiring. It deals mainly in platitudes and abstractions, with just enough detail to hold your interest and keep you hoping for something more. Kind of like a campaign speech, come to think of it.
“It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk. Powerful men often treat women as sexual playthings. Reporters do not always get things right. Politicians sometimes lie. If any of that sounds like news to you, then you may well find “The Ides of March” downright electrifying.”
Clooney knows better than anyone else that this is the path to the Oscars! He specializes in doing the predictably different! For the most part the Oscars are about feel-good movies whether in very commercial categories or otherwise (the offbeat years!). And feel-good here does not mean films which have that aspirational themes or are about hokey American values (though all of this too) but also those that are different without necessarily putting the audience on the spot. For example we see classics that might once have attracted controversy being dug up to make ‘important’ films, paraplegics followed by quadriplegics, mental disorders followed by learning disabilities, on and on, then the obligatory holocaust works or other subsets of this from other parts of the world, ‘hope’ in African slums, simple dramas from Scandinavia (they are the only foreign countries with the luxury of doing ‘normal’ and winning! because hey no existential angst in Scandinavia is pretty freaky too!), novelized political dramas about Latin America constantly referencing some bad old dictator who made people disappear, all kinds of French films can win though preferably the quirky kind these days. This reads like caricature but I haven’t even exhausted the predictable possibilities. The critics complain every year and they’re right. You make up a list of the 10 brightest international directors over the last 20 years or so and probably not one on the list has won an Oscar! Never mind. They’ll given lifetime achievement awards once their films become more digestible in another 40 years or so.
Clooney knows his industry which relative to its resources and talent pool and the institutional support it enjoys might still be the most bankrupt one around. Even ‘off-beat’ from this industry is predictable most of the time. There are of course some interesting directors doing major productions and sometimes more auteurist stuff on the side. And unlike Bollywood it is still overall a very professional apparatus but once again all of this at the service of utter mediocrity and including commercial genres. I’m a great critic of Bollywood. But Hollywood is worse in many ways. Yes they’re at the cutting edge in terms of a great deal of technological innovation, yes you can see a number of Hollywood films every year and enjoy them, which is a fantasy with Bollywood, but pound for pound and again given what the industry’s got going for it 95% of the stuff it produces is pretty shameful.
Clooney knows all of this. According to his close friend Brad Pitt no one has figured out the Hollywood game better than he has. And it shows! Because Clooney does the predictably interesting (!) which is to say that which gets the reviews and can also gross a fair bit and win some awards, within the thriller format he rarely does complete junk, usually it’s more low-key and quirky, sometimes he goes more offbeat with the right director and here he even settles for an ensemble part and occasionally a very well-established genre with just a little more sense to it. Overall he does just a great mix of the commercially and critically viable. He hasn’t sold out completely. for example he used to do some regular thrillers once that he doesn’t anymore. But what I like about him is that he doesn’t take it all too seriously. His compromise is one a great deal of actors could learn from.
Industries the world over become at least in their major mainstream formats about a lot of stunts and a lot of action and a lot of bargain basement comedy. Often with all these married together. The standard ‘sensible’ cinema of once upon a time has today become off-beat almost as a matter of definition unless major stars agree to be a part of it in which case it’s different with an audience! And then you have the film festival fare. An increasing number of industries competing for this globally and here too 95% of the time it’s predictable fare. Good films but not surprising ones and usually made very cynical for a series of festival hops.
Now there is a lot of good stuff being made in all of these industries. And even if one is still anchored in one or two industries as a matter of necessity ertainly some opportunities have opened up that weren’t there before not to mention the greater access to all these cinemas (one is less restricted to a national industry) but it’s such excess that it’s often hard to get through the sheer volume to find that little gem. Even when one does it’s so easy to forget it! Specially if one tries to be too prolific with one’s viewing.
By and large though cinema globally has become about stimuli. All kinds of media and new technological forms compete with cinema for the audience. And cinema naturally suffers. It becomes less about narrative but actually less about ‘vision’ in any ordinary sense of the term. Watching Drive recently cheered me up far more than more important kinds of cinema whether in Hollywood or elsewhere. A pretty basic storyline here, a pretty unsurprising genre and so on but nonetheless a very compelling film. This is the kind of ‘normal’ that most industries need far more of. and of course there are similar examples in other genres. It ought not to be that hard to get this kind of work on a fairly regular basis. But there isn’t much of an audience for this sort of thing anymore. Drive didn’t do much at all though relative to its budget it’s quite safe.
In such a situation Clooney’s choices seem entirely reasonable! But again he’s not a sell-out either. And speaking of which I revisited his Out of Sight with Soderbergh the other day. This remains fresh in a number of ways.
It’s fair to say that the real prestige reviewers aren’t hot on this one but the performances have been generally praised. And some are also soft on the film as they see it as part of Clooney’s overall project to do meaningful stuff as often as he can.
Boxoficeguru called the reviews strong but not universally glowing.
A mod,erate sized release and a predicted weekend of 14 million which is low IMO,given the starcast.
Enjoyed this a lot. Won’t disagree that it’s predictable in some ways but it’s nonetheless gripping throughout. And the performances make it worthwhile, specially Gosling who’s really becoming my favorite Hollywood actor. Or more precisely he’s always been a very promising talent but is really coming into his own as a star.
Having said that this film too has the very familiar problem of reducing politics to ‘a bag of dirty tricks’ and really making ideology secondary to the ‘game’. However Clooney redeems the film somewhat in the great close-up at the end of the film. A mirror is offered to the audience in a sense. But again often discussions on politics are very personality-oriented. This is fine at one level but it also ends up obscuring much more profound systemic problems. So for example raising millions of dollars to run a Senate campaign or hundreds of millions of dollars on a presidential one (the Obama campaign is looking to become the first to touch 1 bn! even if they seem to be challenged in Wall St quarters at the moment!) entails an obvious problem. The same goes for K street lobbying in Congress and so on. The real problem here is institutionalized corruption. But leaving this aside the electorate is never put on the spot. Politicians are routinely criticized for spin and not telling the truth and what not but the ‘truth’ is rarely rewarded in a campaign by voters, at least without the admixture of heavy spin.
agreed.. should have had a 15m start at the very least. But then I didn’t realize that this 10-12m range is fairly typical for a Clooney film. Nonetheless to open below drive’s 11m or so must be considered disappointing.
and here I should also add specially for those who think I use ideological excuses to support certain Hindi film stars and not others well Clooney is a classic example of the very same. I have great admiration for his ‘project’ in terms of a movie career and the way in which he splits the difference. And because I’ve also seen a number of his interviews his commitment to this project becomes that much more clear. doesn’t mean that he’s doing phenomenal movies or anything but I like the tone of his middle of the road stuff. As well as the fact that even when he does genre cinema for the box office he tries to keep things a little more intelligent. Over the last half decade or more his career shows a certain ‘navigation’ which is significant. It’s not like he’s a Leo who’s getting some of the choicest directors/projects around. He’s obviously not regarded highly enough as an actor to get those. But for that matter even DiCaprio has avoided the low hanging fruit of rom-com and so on. He’s taken some time but he’s slowly built his way up to his current status in the post-Titanic years. However a Clooney always has to be ‘smarter’ than a Depp or a Di Caprio or a Brad Pit. for the obvious reasons. And again he is Aamir-like in the sense that he’s understood the ins and outs of the Hollywood system better than anyone else. At least according to Pitt (though also I’ve heard some others suggest as much). So in the final analysis and looking at all the contexts I tend to cut him a great deal of slack. I also cheer his box office success whenever and wherever he gets it irrespective of whether I’m a great supporter of the films or not.
Saw the film. Decent enough but m main problem is what Satyam said.,
Reducng politics to a bag of dirty tricks. Gosling is great.
Had the trailer of .Edgar wich looks god. De Caprios’s get up is great but am not confident that Eastwood has not ‘smplified Hoover too much.
Saw the movie on DVD yesterday. Haven’t really read the above reviews/discussion. However I must say that its not really “bag of dirty tricks” but rather a “dirty bag of tricks”. Lol. Really speaking, I did not see the politician as “evil” character and he even has very small role; come to think of it, he is also a sort of a pawn under the team he builds. The movie pretty much focusses on Gosling who dominates every single frame almost. The dialogues are so subtle and softly spoken, where you really do not get a sense of “high” drama unfolding. Instead of a dirty tricks, I really saw it as game of chess where you are ahead only if you can guess what your *opponent* is thinking but then you don’t really even know who that special character (opponent) might be. There is element of surprise there when those *backstabbers* appear. For power ultimately all *values* will be compromised.
—–X—–X—
“And again he is Aamir-like in the sense that he’s understood the ins and outs of the Hollywood system better than anyone else.”
Somewhere I read that days of auditioning and gaining work in hollywood are over and the only way to survive is to create content. I think it is a smart movie (in any career) really. Oprah had only been a newsreader if she had not syndicated. Everyone wants to go in business for themselves instead of earning money for someone else; even bigb launched his own abcl etc. I don’t think you can hold THAT *against* someone; in fact it is a skill to be admired!
July 28, 2011 at 9:49 PM
Looks good. Interesting to see DiCaprio’s name as Executive Producer.
July 28, 2011 at 10:01 PM
Clooney has mastered the art of picking interesting films within the genres he attempts. Pitt once said that no one he knew had figured out the Hollywood game better than Clooney in terms of doing the right commercial films, the right critical favorites and so on.
July 28, 2011 at 10:10 PM
He’s not much of an actor but he’s got a deep understanding of what’s in his wheelhouse and what’s not and that’s why he’s consistently striking the right balance. I’m not a big fan of all those movies but I also wouldn’t argue against them to a great degree.
Actually I just recently caught up with The American and that could have been a stale film but it’s quite effective.
July 28, 2011 at 11:33 PM
according to imdb dicaprio was considered in the lead role(clooney’s role?) but turned it down and stayed as executive producer.
this movie has a powerhouse of a cast. looking forward to it very much.
July 29, 2011 at 12:02 AM
releases oct 7.
September 19, 2011 at 8:17 AM
October 4, 2011 at 12:00 PM
Primary Suspect
“The Ides of March.”
by Anthony Lane October 10, 2011
In his new film, “The Ides of March,” George Clooney plays Governor Mike Morris, a Presidential hopeful. He’s a Democrat, that being Clooney’s flavor of choice, although, as the movie progressed, I was slowly gripped by the urge to see him cast as a Republican. The G.O.P. is absent from the movie, as if it were something that could be wished away, but, when you inspect Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman, the public sheen that they project—sculpted, spotless, and not quite of this world—seems awfully close to Clooney’s affable perfection. The gulf between him and them, in ideology, may be vast, but it’s easily bridged: when the next TV debate comes along, just reach for your remote, and hit mute.
Most of the action unfolds in Ohio, where Morris is running in a Presidential primary. He has a squad of staffers, headed by his keen pup of a press spokesman, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), who has a lean and hungry look, and the shaggier, full-bellied figure of Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman)—Morris’s campaign manager, and the human equivalent of a smoke-filled room. The cinematography, by Phedon Papamichael, wants nothing to do with blue skies, preferring the heavens above to be as gray as the slush underfoot. There’s a terrific shot of Zara getting into the Governor’s S.U.V., a hulking black hearse, which has backed into an alley in Cincinnati. Inside, and unheard by us, Zara talks to Morris, then climbs out and lights a cigarette, while the car pulls away. The whole scene, with its twin aromas of the shambolic and the cabalistic, has an honest political stink.
Morris’s opponent is named Pullman (Michael Mantell), but we hardly notice the guy. What matters is his team, led by Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), Zara’s opposite number, and there can’t be a moviegoer who won’t thrill to the early sight of Giamatti and Hoffman, eying each other backstage at the end of a candidates’ debate. Two strong actors, at the summit of their game, getting ready to square off: it’s like watching Nadal and Federer, minus the muscle tone, knocking up for a couple of minutes before the first serve. The streak of sportiveness is there in Gosling’s character, too, when he declares, “This is the big leagues. It’s mean. When you make a mistake, you lose the right to play.” Yet Myers is less ludic than his partners in the game, who’ve seen it all before; he behaves like someone seeing it for the first time, and his speech is larded with imperatives. “He has to win,” he says of his boss, and, “I have to believe in the cause.” In short, he clings to what Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), a Times reporter, and almost a buddy of his, derides as “all this ‘take back the country’ nonsense.” Morris himself uses the same phrase, in a speech near the end, and, again, you can’t help thinking, Wrong side. These fellows should be sipping with the Tea Party.
“The Ides of March” is directed by Clooney, who wrote the script with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, basing it on “Farragut North,” Willimon’s original play. In the theatre, apparently, we never saw the Governor; he was the sun king around whom people spun, but he shone offstage, and I half wish that Clooney had borrowed the conceit for the film. He could have modelled himself on the six-foot rabbit in “Harvey”—glimpsed only in portrait form, but ceaselessly mooned over by his chief admirer. The quirk of this movie is that, for all its pretensions to topical soothsaying and its sombre machinations of plot, it remains, in essence, a love story. True, Myers has a fling with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a twenty-year-old intern on the campaign, who sashays up to his desk with the word “Trouble” more or less flashing in pink neon over her head, but what they share is witheringly loveless. When a caller asks who is with him in his hotel room, he replies, “Nobody. Cleaning lady.” But consider them having sex: Stearns beneath, Myers on top, and his face tilted sideways, gazing at Morris on TV. On the back of the Governor’s campaign bus is the slogan “I Like Mike,” but Myers is done with mere liking. Steve Loves Mike. He loves him in the same self-angering way that Cassius, I imagine, used to worship Caesar, before the latter swelled into a god. There are small shimmers of gay longing on display here—Myers getting “all goosebumpy,” as Horowicz points out, at the very thought of Morris, or tearing up slightly as he watches his boss breeze through a Q.&A.—but further than that the movie fears to tread.
As if to reinforce that shyness, all the twists are straight. The Governor, more to Myers’s astonishment than to ours, turns out to have feet of clay. Well, not feet. Let’s just say that portions of him are proved to be clay-based. I wondered whether Myers, given his devotion to Morris, would take the ultimate rap for him, but no: Cassius turns, hates, and bites, and we are ushered into a seedy subplot whose crevices I cannot reveal, although it feels no more believable for being so grim. Clooney is famed as a prankster, and his best performances, in films like “Out of Sight,” are strewn with smiles, so it came as a shock to realize how unfunny “The Ides of March” is—how solidly it takes its cue from the stony and self-important Myers. I am as simple a sucker as anyone for depictions of dark deeds in high places, and I will cozy up to “The Parallax View,” say, whenever it shows on TV. Likewise, late in “The Ides of March,” the sequence in which Myers and Morris, not wanting to be disturbed, meet and trade threats in a hotel kitchen after dark, surrounded with steelware, rings as sharp as a filleting knife. But does it ring true? The fact remains that, over time, such paranoid accounts of political conduct grow less convincing than their comic counterparts. For a wise, conspiracy-free insight into those who thirst for office, try “The Great McGinty,” directed by Preston Sturges, who would have taken one look at Myers and posed the questions that Clooney dodges throughout. How can “the best media mind in the country,” as Duffy calls Myers, also be such a rube? And what about Stearns? The second half of the film presents her as a pure victim, so why, in the first half, was the lady such a vamp?
Clooney and company could have used Sturges—or, even better, Clifford Odets—when it came to rewrites. With all the betrayals and gassy ambitions swirling around here, we badly need dialogue to ignite the film, instead of which even the most aggressive spirits keep firing the dampest of lines. Zara: “My fucking blood pressure’s going through the goddam roof right now.” Duffy: “You stay in this business long enough, you’re gonna get jaded and cynical.” These phrases explain too much, like the patter of a crime series that has played too long on television. In so doing, they chime with Alexandre Desplat’s inoffensive score, which comes to its anticlimax as Myers and Stearns head off to a fateful appointment. They’re in his car, but, to judge by the music that envelops them, they might as well be riding an elevator.
To enter “The Ides of March” with lofty, Myers-like hopes, as I did, may not have been the smartest of plans. Still, it’s hard not to feel bruised with disappointment as the final credits roll, although the names listed there—which include Jeffrey Wright, in the role of a potent senator—offer some clue to what went awry. This film is full of great actors, but not enough people. The first image in the movie is that of a microphone and a halo of light, followed by Gosling’s face, and, from here on, entire swathes of the action are confined to closeups. Jennifer Ehle, who plays Morris’s wife, gets a single speaking scene, on the bus, with nothing visible below the level of her pearls. You can see what Clooney and Papamichael were aiming for: a shadow-hatched chamber piece, with men and women battling head to head. But this is meant to be politics, not a murder mystery, and, without more than a sprinkling of voters in the frame, and with even Morris’s campaign headquarters retaining a weird and orderly calm, the tale runs out of air.
When Robert Redford (another beautiful, liberal leading man, to whom, as with Clooney, rumors of genuine political activity were attached) appeared in “The Candidate,” in 1972, he inched toward a Clooney-like vision of political endeavor as, if not a necessary evil, at any rate an intolerable marketing exercise, one that could scoop the ideals and the zest from a man’s soul like crabmeat out of a claw. Catch the film again, however, and notice how the director, Michael Ritchie, packs the opening minutes, and most of what ensues, with regular, unstarry folk—those to whom the Redford character must appeal, and who could turn against him on a dime. “The Ides of March” is never that scruffy, or that alive. It takes its title, of course, from “Julius Caesar,” yet Shakespeare’s stage directions indicate “certain Commoners” who throng the start of the play, and we read of “the press”—the crowd, that is, not paparazzi—who jostle Caesar, and fill his ears, before the soothsayer utters his warning. In films, as in elections, extras are not an option. Without them, there’s no show
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/10/10/111010crci_cinema_lane?printable=true#ixzz1ZpTuTjFK
October 4, 2011 at 1:03 PM
Ryan Gosling and Clooney bring it on. 83% at rotten tomatoes.
October 4, 2011 at 2:25 PM
yeah will definitely be checking it out this weekend..
October 6, 2011 at 2:19 PM
October 6, 2011
Movie Review | ‘The Ides of March’
Love and Loss on the Campaign Trail
By A. O. SCOTT
Mike Morris, the governor of Pennsylvania in “The Ides of March,” is an image of the liberal heart’s desire, and not only because he is played by George Clooney. Morris, who keeps his cool while inflaming the passions of Democratic primary voters, is a committed environmentalist and a forthright secularist who sidesteps questions about his faith by professing that his religion is the United States Constitution. He is against war and in favor of jobs, though the economy figures much less in his fictitious campaign than it will in the real one just around the corner.
In spite of Morris’s party affiliation and expressed positions — which are tailored to sound both vague and provocative — “The Ides of March” is not an ideological fairy tale. It is easy enough, while watching Morris in action, to substitute a different set of talking points and imagine the governor as a Republican dream candidate, smoothly defending low taxes and traditional values in the same seductive whisper. (Who is the right-wing George Clooney? Is Tom Selleck still available?)
But it is difficult, really, to connect this fable to the world it pretends to represent. Whatever happens in 2012, within either party or in the contest between them, it seems fair to say that quite a lot will be at stake. That is not the case in “The Ides of March,” which is less an allegory of the American political process than a busy, foggy, mildly entertaining antidote to it.
Morris, locked in a battle for the nomination with a colorless (and barely seen) Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell), is a bit of a cipher, or perhaps a symbol. He stands for an ideal of political charisma that the film, directed by Mr. Clooney and based on the play “Farragut North” by Beau Willimon, sets out to tarnish. And yet it seems doubtful, after more than a decade of scandal, acrimony and bare-knuckled media brawling, that this noble fantasy exists anywhere but in the minds of writers and actors who look back fondly on the glorious make-believe administrations of Henry Fonda and Martin Sheen.
“You stay in this business long enough, you get jaded and cynical,” one campaign staffer says to another. “The Ides of March” sets out first to rebut this bit of conventional wisdom, then to reaffirm it. It is in large part the tale of a professional politico’s loss of innocence. Not Morris’s, but that of Stephen Meyers, a young hotshot on the governor’s campaign staff who is played, with sad-eyed intensity, by Ryan Gosling. His prodigious talents are mentioned rather than shown, but we can accept that he is both a dazzling tactical brain and, what’s more, a true believer, working for Morris because he thinks Morris is the last, best hope for America.
Stephen’s boss is Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose counterpart in the Pullman campaign is Tom Duffy, played by Paul Giamatti. “The Ides of March” feels most alive and truest to its ostensible subject when these two soft-bellied, sharp-tongued schlubs do battle, with the angelic Stephen in the middle. Hovering around him like a crow circling carrion is Marisa Tomei as Ida Horowicz, a New York Times reporter who might be the only journalist covering the campaign or at least the only one with a speaking part in the movie. (Go team!)
But what political drama there is in this film — will Morris win the Ohio primary? Will his staff cut a deal with a vain and imperious North Carolina senator (Jeffrey Wright)? — is scaffolding rather than substance. As the Shakespearean title suggests, “The Ides of March” has loftier, less time-bound matters on its mind: the nature of honor, the price of loyalty, the ways that a man’s actions are a measure of his character.
These themes, swathed in Alexandre Desplat’s dark-hued score and Phedon Papamichael’s chocolate-and-burgundy cinematography, come into relief as Stephen encounters turbulence in his career and his personal life. He stumbles into a professional flirtation with Duffy, and almost simultaneously into some hot campaign sex with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a young woman who is — no points for guessing right — an intern. She also has a powerful daddy and a secret in her past that has the potential to send Stephen’s career and the Morris campaign into a tailspin.
Mr. Clooney handles the plot complications with elegant dexterity. As an actor, he works best in long, understated scenes that allow him to play with nuances of charm and menace, so it is not surprising that, as a director, he gives the rest of the cast room to work. But the parts of “The Ides of March” — quiet scenes between Mr. Gosling and Ms. Wood; swirling, Sorkinesque exchanges of banter; any time Ms. Tomei or Max Minghella (as a campaign worker grooming himself to be the next Stephen Meyers) are in the room — are greater than the whole.
Somehow, the film is missing both adrenaline and gravity, notwithstanding some frantic early moments and a late swerve toward tragedy. It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk. Powerful men often treat women as sexual playthings. Reporters do not always get things right. Politicians sometimes lie. If any of that sounds like news to you, then you may well find “The Ides of March” downright electrifying.
More likely, though, you will find it more comforting than inspiring. It deals mainly in platitudes and abstractions, with just enough detail to hold your interest and keep you hoping for something more. Kind of like a campaign speech, come to think of it.
October 6, 2011 at 2:50 PM
“It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk. Powerful men often treat women as sexual playthings. Reporters do not always get things right. Politicians sometimes lie. If any of that sounds like news to you, then you may well find “The Ides of March” downright electrifying.”
Clooney knows better than anyone else that this is the path to the Oscars! He specializes in doing the predictably different! For the most part the Oscars are about feel-good movies whether in very commercial categories or otherwise (the offbeat years!). And feel-good here does not mean films which have that aspirational themes or are about hokey American values (though all of this too) but also those that are different without necessarily putting the audience on the spot. For example we see classics that might once have attracted controversy being dug up to make ‘important’ films, paraplegics followed by quadriplegics, mental disorders followed by learning disabilities, on and on, then the obligatory holocaust works or other subsets of this from other parts of the world, ‘hope’ in African slums, simple dramas from Scandinavia (they are the only foreign countries with the luxury of doing ‘normal’ and winning! because hey no existential angst in Scandinavia is pretty freaky too!), novelized political dramas about Latin America constantly referencing some bad old dictator who made people disappear, all kinds of French films can win though preferably the quirky kind these days. This reads like caricature but I haven’t even exhausted the predictable possibilities. The critics complain every year and they’re right. You make up a list of the 10 brightest international directors over the last 20 years or so and probably not one on the list has won an Oscar! Never mind. They’ll given lifetime achievement awards once their films become more digestible in another 40 years or so.
Clooney knows his industry which relative to its resources and talent pool and the institutional support it enjoys might still be the most bankrupt one around. Even ‘off-beat’ from this industry is predictable most of the time. There are of course some interesting directors doing major productions and sometimes more auteurist stuff on the side. And unlike Bollywood it is still overall a very professional apparatus but once again all of this at the service of utter mediocrity and including commercial genres. I’m a great critic of Bollywood. But Hollywood is worse in many ways. Yes they’re at the cutting edge in terms of a great deal of technological innovation, yes you can see a number of Hollywood films every year and enjoy them, which is a fantasy with Bollywood, but pound for pound and again given what the industry’s got going for it 95% of the stuff it produces is pretty shameful.
Clooney knows all of this. According to his close friend Brad Pitt no one has figured out the Hollywood game better than he has. And it shows! Because Clooney does the predictably interesting (!) which is to say that which gets the reviews and can also gross a fair bit and win some awards, within the thriller format he rarely does complete junk, usually it’s more low-key and quirky, sometimes he goes more offbeat with the right director and here he even settles for an ensemble part and occasionally a very well-established genre with just a little more sense to it. Overall he does just a great mix of the commercially and critically viable. He hasn’t sold out completely. for example he used to do some regular thrillers once that he doesn’t anymore. But what I like about him is that he doesn’t take it all too seriously. His compromise is one a great deal of actors could learn from.
Industries the world over become at least in their major mainstream formats about a lot of stunts and a lot of action and a lot of bargain basement comedy. Often with all these married together. The standard ‘sensible’ cinema of once upon a time has today become off-beat almost as a matter of definition unless major stars agree to be a part of it in which case it’s different with an audience! And then you have the film festival fare. An increasing number of industries competing for this globally and here too 95% of the time it’s predictable fare. Good films but not surprising ones and usually made very cynical for a series of festival hops.
Now there is a lot of good stuff being made in all of these industries. And even if one is still anchored in one or two industries as a matter of necessity ertainly some opportunities have opened up that weren’t there before not to mention the greater access to all these cinemas (one is less restricted to a national industry) but it’s such excess that it’s often hard to get through the sheer volume to find that little gem. Even when one does it’s so easy to forget it! Specially if one tries to be too prolific with one’s viewing.
By and large though cinema globally has become about stimuli. All kinds of media and new technological forms compete with cinema for the audience. And cinema naturally suffers. It becomes less about narrative but actually less about ‘vision’ in any ordinary sense of the term. Watching Drive recently cheered me up far more than more important kinds of cinema whether in Hollywood or elsewhere. A pretty basic storyline here, a pretty unsurprising genre and so on but nonetheless a very compelling film. This is the kind of ‘normal’ that most industries need far more of. and of course there are similar examples in other genres. It ought not to be that hard to get this kind of work on a fairly regular basis. But there isn’t much of an audience for this sort of thing anymore. Drive didn’t do much at all though relative to its budget it’s quite safe.
In such a situation Clooney’s choices seem entirely reasonable! But again he’s not a sell-out either. And speaking of which I revisited his Out of Sight with Soderbergh the other day. This remains fresh in a number of ways.
October 6, 2011 at 2:54 PM
This one is not going to the Oscars. Reviews are mildly positive.
October 6, 2011 at 3:02 PM
It’s come down to 75% on rottentomatoes after doing 83% earlier on. You’re probably right on the Oscars for this one. will be watching it in any case!
October 7, 2011 at 6:07 PM
it’s gone upto 82% again.
October 7, 2011 at 6:11 PM
It’s fair to say that the real prestige reviewers aren’t hot on this one but the performances have been generally praised. And some are also soft on the film as they see it as part of Clooney’s overall project to do meaningful stuff as often as he can.
October 6, 2011 at 3:44 PM
Yeah it’s not going anywhere.
October 7, 2011 at 6:12 PM
Boxoficeguru called the reviews strong but not universally glowing.
A mod,erate sized release and a predicted weekend of 14 million which is low IMO,given the starcast.
October 7, 2011 at 6:22 PM
this sort of film shouldn’t open at less than 20. So yes 14m is low unless it has amazing legs which is unlikely.
October 9, 2011 at 3:46 PM
Enjoyed this a lot. Won’t disagree that it’s predictable in some ways but it’s nonetheless gripping throughout. And the performances make it worthwhile, specially Gosling who’s really becoming my favorite Hollywood actor. Or more precisely he’s always been a very promising talent but is really coming into his own as a star.
October 9, 2011 at 4:23 PM
Having said that this film too has the very familiar problem of reducing politics to ‘a bag of dirty tricks’ and really making ideology secondary to the ‘game’. However Clooney redeems the film somewhat in the great close-up at the end of the film. A mirror is offered to the audience in a sense. But again often discussions on politics are very personality-oriented. This is fine at one level but it also ends up obscuring much more profound systemic problems. So for example raising millions of dollars to run a Senate campaign or hundreds of millions of dollars on a presidential one (the Obama campaign is looking to become the first to touch 1 bn! even if they seem to be challenged in Wall St quarters at the moment!) entails an obvious problem. The same goes for K street lobbying in Congress and so on. The real problem here is institutionalized corruption. But leaving this aside the electorate is never put on the spot. Politicians are routinely criticized for spin and not telling the truth and what not but the ‘truth’ is rarely rewarded in a campaign by voters, at least without the admixture of heavy spin.
October 9, 2011 at 4:35 PM
Am kind of disaPpointed it posted a very mild 10 mill and change at the BO.
October 9, 2011 at 4:42 PM
agreed.. should have had a 15m start at the very least. But then I didn’t realize that this 10-12m range is fairly typical for a Clooney film. Nonetheless to open below drive’s 11m or so must be considered disappointing.
October 9, 2011 at 8:38 PM
and here I should also add specially for those who think I use ideological excuses to support certain Hindi film stars and not others well Clooney is a classic example of the very same. I have great admiration for his ‘project’ in terms of a movie career and the way in which he splits the difference. And because I’ve also seen a number of his interviews his commitment to this project becomes that much more clear. doesn’t mean that he’s doing phenomenal movies or anything but I like the tone of his middle of the road stuff. As well as the fact that even when he does genre cinema for the box office he tries to keep things a little more intelligent. Over the last half decade or more his career shows a certain ‘navigation’ which is significant. It’s not like he’s a Leo who’s getting some of the choicest directors/projects around. He’s obviously not regarded highly enough as an actor to get those. But for that matter even DiCaprio has avoided the low hanging fruit of rom-com and so on. He’s taken some time but he’s slowly built his way up to his current status in the post-Titanic years. However a Clooney always has to be ‘smarter’ than a Depp or a Di Caprio or a Brad Pit. for the obvious reasons. And again he is Aamir-like in the sense that he’s understood the ins and outs of the Hollywood system better than anyone else. At least according to Pitt (though also I’ve heard some others suggest as much). So in the final analysis and looking at all the contexts I tend to cut him a great deal of slack. I also cheer his box office success whenever and wherever he gets it irrespective of whether I’m a great supporter of the films or not.
October 9, 2011 at 6:34 PM
have u seen the movie Fracture? hopkins vs gosling set the screen on fire…
October 9, 2011 at 8:31 PM
yes I have.. I’ve seen everything he’s done with the exception of that comedy he did recently.
October 17, 2011 at 6:52 PM
Saw the film. Decent enough but m main problem is what Satyam said.,
Reducng politics to a bag of dirty tricks. Gosling is great.
Had the trailer of .Edgar wich looks god. De Caprios’s get up is great but am not confident that Eastwood has not ‘smplified Hoover too much.
January 29, 2012 at 1:18 AM
Saw the movie on DVD yesterday. Haven’t really read the above reviews/discussion. However I must say that its not really “bag of dirty tricks” but rather a “dirty bag of tricks”. Lol. Really speaking, I did not see the politician as “evil” character and he even has very small role; come to think of it, he is also a sort of a pawn under the team he builds. The movie pretty much focusses on Gosling who dominates every single frame almost. The dialogues are so subtle and softly spoken, where you really do not get a sense of “high” drama unfolding. Instead of a dirty tricks, I really saw it as game of chess where you are ahead only if you can guess what your *opponent* is thinking but then you don’t really even know who that special character (opponent) might be. There is element of surprise there when those *backstabbers* appear. For power ultimately all *values* will be compromised.
—–X—–X—
“And again he is Aamir-like in the sense that he’s understood the ins and outs of the Hollywood system better than anyone else.”
Somewhere I read that days of auditioning and gaining work in hollywood are over and the only way to survive is to create content. I think it is a smart movie (in any career) really. Oprah had only been a newsreader if she had not syndicated. Everyone wants to go in business for themselves instead of earning money for someone else; even bigb launched his own abcl etc. I don’t think you can hold THAT *against* someone; in fact it is a skill to be admired!
January 29, 2012 at 1:20 AM
” I did not see the politician as “evil” character”
Right away. Until about the middle of the movie. In fact I initially felt he had ideals/values and was good guy!
January 29, 2012 at 1:22 AM
” I think it is a smart movie ”
I think it is a smart move.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
January 29, 2012 at 5:17 AM
Di-”However I must say that its not really “bag of dirty tricks” but rather a “dirty bag of tricks”