George Clooney’s directorial-career-as-future-political-campaign is taken to the next level in The Ides of March, a heart-pounding adaptation of Beau Willimon’s Off Broadway play “Farragut North.” Casting himself as the favored candidate to represent the democratic party in the upcoming election, Clooney knows to stay out of the way of his fellow cast members, who – Ryan Gosling especially – carry the weight of the film on their backs. As a film about the Democratic primaries in swing state Ohio, the script carefully skirts around preaching the party’s ideologies, and focuses more on the leap-frog tactics and shaky loyalty that is rampant in the general political sphere. While there isn’t much complexity in its thesis, it is nonetheless a gripping, well-spun yarn.
With typically fuzzy illegitimacy, the decision over which man will eventually lead our country is shown to hinge on a set of small, barely significant gestures. Governor Mike Morris (Clooney) thinks, with good reason, that he has his race in the bag. However, when his press secretary Stephen Meyers (Gosling) succumbs to an under-the-counter meeting with his rival’s campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), a stealthy blog campaign is revealed that could be the end of him. The noisy net is hardly the concern, though, when a New York Times writer (Marisa Tomei) threatens to publish a story on the leaked fact that Meyers and Duffy met at all. The revelation of disloyalty spins Morris’ campaign into a whirlwind of deceit and concealments that create nerve-racking tension. Pretty much everyone is forced to keep one eye on getting Morris into the White House, and the other glancing at their footing on the wobbly job ladder.
A subplot that only integrates into the stampede of scandals at some point in the script’s latter stages involves a love affair between Meyer and Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), one of Morris’ interns. Cubicle flirting swiftly transitions into an after-hours affair, and it’s all initially superfluous – that obligatory romance injection that allows the attractive actors to remove some layers. But when a late-night phone call to Molly’s cell spirals into Meyer’s own budding desperation, a bombshell of convoluted blackmail springs to the fore. A thriller of this sort probably didn’t need to escalate to the level of melodrama that it progressively marches toward, but some of the bizarre kinks in the final reel do elicit a genuine “oh snap†or two.
What really keeps the train on the track, though, is another victorious running from Mr. Gosling. Not quite as stoic as his explosive presence in Drive, he inevitably exhibits a comparably composed boiling pot. His Meyers never truly loses his temper, but it’s to Gosling’s credit that it always feels like he’s about to pop. Giamatti, Tomei, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Morris’ own jaded campaign manager Paul) round out the superb thesping crew, which stays toe-to-toe with Gosling throughout. Similarly strong camera work from Phedon Papamichael lend a mechanical precision to the well-oiled bureaucratic machine, competently governing a deliberately-paced procession of primary colors and chiaroscuro spotlighting.
Reviewed on September 8th at the 2011 Toronto Int. Film Festival – Galas Programme
100 Mins.
