The Ides of March
George Clooney (2011)
The Ides of March is based on a stage play called Farragut North by Beau Willimon, who worked on the screenplay with George Clooney and Grant Heslov. I don’t know how closely the film follows the play but it doesn’t show its stage origins: you don’t have the sense that the movement between locations is a matter of opening up the action simply to prove the piece’s cinematic credentials – to Clooney’s credit, The Ides of March feels like a movie. It’s true the characters talk a lot but their line of work – the story focuses on a candidate in a US presidential race, and his campaign team – allows us to accept that talkiness as believable. A fair amount of the words we hear are delivered from public platforms or in television interviews or debates: it may be that Clooney’s own activism made him think that having the characters engage in intelligent political debate on screen was enough to give them, and the film, depth. If so, he was mistaken. The underlying material is weak: the script isn’t a fresh or penetrating analysis of party political animals and the plotting is far from convincing. As in Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney’s conviction that he’s dealing with morally significant themes blinds him to the shallowness of the drama. Yet he seems to be a natural at pacing scenes and telling a story (he’s aided by his brilliant editor Stephen Mirrione) – the film is crisply entertaining and sometimes compelling. If the screenplay is second rate, much of the acting, especially Ryan Gosling’s, is a cut above.
Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, the junior campaign manager for Mike Morris (Clooney), a Pennsylvania Governor who’s engaged in a knife-edge contest for the Democratic nomination with Arkansas Senator Ted Pullman (Mike Mantell). The action takes place during the crucial Ohio primary. Both candidates know that getting the endorsement of a third man, Senator Thompson (Jeffrey Wright), and the Convention delegates he controls, will deliver them the nomination, regardless of the result in Ohio. The momentum all looks to be with Morris but things start going wrong when his fiercely loyal senior campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) goes for a meeting with Thompson. This is meant to seal the deal but doesn’t, essentially because Mike Morris isn’t prepared to compromise his candidacy by guaranteeing Thompson, in return for his immediate endorsement. a senior cabinet post if Morris becomes President. Meyers, in the meantime, shows both his naivete and his potential for treachery by agreeing to a meeting with Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), Pullman’s campaign manager: Duffy tries to convince Meyers that Morris will lose anyway, and to persuade him to jump ship and join the Pullman team. Meyers starts an affair with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a young intern on the Morris team. While Molly’s asleep one night, Meyers takes a call on her mobile: he’s astonished to find that the caller is Morris and even more astonished to find out from Molly that she’s pregnant as the result of a brief liaison with the Governor during the Iowa caucus earlier in the year. Meyers quickly arranges for Molly to have an abortion; the same day, he’s fired from the campaign team because his conversation with Duffy has been leaked to a New York Times journalist (Marisa Tomei) – leaked by Zara, who can’t forgive what he sees as Meyers’ disloyalty. Molly is terrified that Meyers, now he’s off the campaign, will blow the gaff; she takes a fatal overdose of the tablets she was given at the abortion clinic. Instead of telling all, the vengeful Meyers threatens to expose Morris. He virtually blackmails him into buying the Thompson endorsement, firing Zara and giving Meyers the top job on the campaign team. The film ends with Morris assured of the nomination (and, we’re led to believe, the presidency, in the absence of a credible Republican candidate), with Meyers in charge of steering his man to the White House, and with both of them having destroyed their personal credibility.
The Ohio primary is one of the last of the election season (it’s on 12 June in 2012) so the film’s title doesn’t connect to an actual date – it can refer only to ‘Et tu, Brute’ and so on. The camera closes in on Stephen Meyers’ face at the end of The Ides of March to confirm him as the principal seller of his soul but the tale is full of other betrayals. Morris is unfaithful to his wife and to the no deals platform of his campaign. When Meyers, fired from the Morris team, walks into the Pullman campaign headquarters to offer his services, Duffy reveals that he talked with him previously only because he assumed Meyers would tell Zara and the latter wouldn’t forgive him and would, by firing Meyers, weaken Morris’s team: Duffy’s no longer interested in acquiring his services even Meyers offers ‘something big’. Zara himself, although motivated by loyalty towards Morris, betrays Meyers to the journalist, whose sense of honour is unsurprisingly slippery. It isn’t an original idea to show the press and political operators as corrupt or corruptible but, as that long paragraph above shows, there are enough incidents and twists in The Ides of March to mean that lack of originality might not matter if the tricky plot was satisfying in itself. There are elements in the story, though, that don’t make sense and on which that plot crucially depends.
Pullman is politically to the left of Morris so the Republicans fear Morris more: how can Meyers be shocked when Duffy informs him that Republicans registered for Democratic primaries will come out in droves to vote for Pullman? How on earth could Morris believe that, with Meyers back inside the tent, they’d be certain of keeping the Molly Stearns scandal hushed up? Even if this girl weren’t the daughter of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, there’d be an autopsy to establish cause of death; even if that didn’t reveal the girl had just had an abortion, wouldn’t the type of tablets she’d killed herself with, which appear to be a standard prescription from the abortion clinic, already have set the rumour-mill going? (Having Molly the daughter of a national political figure is in every sense a self-inflicted wound for Clooney: apart from drawing attention to the implausibility of her quiet disappearance from the scene, it results in a funeral tribute by her distraught father (Gregory Itzin) which seems to belong in a different film.)
It’s unconvincing too that Morris is the relatively centrist candidate: nearly all we hear him say in public suggests someone who’d be perceived as dangerously liberal in America today. It certainly seems inconceivable that his main opponent for the nomination would be to the left of Morris. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Clooney, having decided to play Morris, wanted to come out with political statements that were personally congenial to him. There are other hints of arrogance in his performance too. Morris doesn’t try to please as obviously as a major political candidate in America is bound to do; the only explanation for his rationing his smiles is that he thinks he’s charming enough already but to have a chance of success he’d need to be more ingratiating – unless, that is, he was George Clooney himself. Clooney is such a fine and intuitive screen actor that he does terrific things almost in spite of himself here. His relationship with the camera is so assured that he’s able, in a profile shot of Morris speaking to a campaign meeting, to show us the candidate constructing his effects and working the audience, without our being able to see the actor doing the same to us. In the one private scene between Morris and his wife, Clooney is effortlessly relaxed and intimate: you’d never dream that shortly after he’ll need to be phoning the twenty-year-old who’s carrying his child. It’s unfortunate that the potential First Lady is played by the exquisitely smug Jennifer Ehle, who excludes sympathy; but Clooney’s casting of Marisa Tomei as the journalist works well. Her screen personality is so different from that of the character she’s playing that she makes her more individual than she might otherwise be. The casting of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti is less surprising but they too animate what are fairly clichéd characters, Hoffman the more successfully.
The truly interesting element of The Ides of March is that Stephen Meyers sees himself as a ruthless political professional from the word go (and he seems that way to us too) but comes to learn that he was a novice in the dark arts. It’s a more sophisticated progress than that of an idealist hardening into a cynic and Clooney has the ideal interpreter of this personality in Ryan Gosling. He’s coolly dynamic, infuriatingly smart-arsed at the start. When Molly wants to go out with Meyers and we watch his reactions, we can’t tell how much of what his face says is part of a professional act and how much, if anything, is sincere, but we assume that he knows and we’ll find out. Evan Rachel Wood does well as Molly but the contrast between her poised boldness in her early scenes and her decline doesn’t have enough layering: you don’t feel eventually that something else was going on below the surface when she made a move on Meyers. The brilliance of Gosling’s portrait is that, when we think back to this scene at the end of the film, we realise that Meyers wasn’t sure what he felt about Molly’s advances. Gosling’s acting is wonderfully calibrated: it enables him to deal with the clumsy psychological transitions the script requires of his character. Meyers takes Molly’s mobile phone from the room she’s died in and uses it to let Morris know he’s able and willing to expose him. Morris, who’s briefly handed over to Zara at a press conference, takes a call from a dead girl and looks round the room to spot the caller. Meyers looks back: when Clooney and Gosling make eye contact the moment is electric. The only problem with acting as sophisticated as this is that it exposes more strongly the comparative crudeness of the script: if the main players weren’t so good, The Ides of March would be a lesser film but it might also be a more simply, shallowly enjoyable political thriller. Either way, it would still have vaguely sinister music by Alexandre Desplat, which Clooney does well to use sparingly, at least until the closing stages. It’s clunky and dull but, to be fair to Desplat, he writes so many big film scores nowadays that it must be hard not to get uninspired.
3 November 2011