The Ides of March
Man it feels good to have Fall Movie Season upon us. I suppose you need the Spring/Summer Season to serve as a sort of palette cleanser... otherwise, you might be jaded by the superior quality of movies. But- holy hell- were there some real awful movies this summer. Honestly, though, with the run of movies I've had...excepting Abduction... it's hard to even remember the summer slop. And Ides of March continues the upward trend... or... I guess... continues along the upward plateau (kind of hard to go up from the A+ of 50/50).
Cutting right to the chase, The Ides of March is a fantastic movie. A political thriller/cautionary tale, it tells the riveting story of a young, hotshot campaign media manager (Ryan Gosling) who gets caught up in the less than glamorous world of a desperate presidential campaign (George Clooney plays Gov. Mike Morris, the hotshot ideologue who is either on the brink of losing the Ohio Democratic Primary or on the cusp of capturing the entire presidential election... because the Republicans haven't got a prayer) where ideology, integrity, loyalty, and even human life are never as important as the campaign itself and should never get in the way of a chance at office. Gosling's Stephen Meyers is a vet of political campaigns, but here he seems to have fallen for the whole Morris package (as schemed, honed, and presented by Morris' campaign manager, Paul Zara, as played by a suitably gruff Philip Seymour Hoffman). Meyers completely buys in: Morris is a candidate of integrity, a candidate who can and will make sweeping changes, and someone who not only should be elected, but needs to be elected. Of course, as the title alludes to, shit hits the fan, things aren't what they seem, and a series of cutthroat political games ensue: the stakes? Morris' chance at office and Meyers' chance at continuing his future as a campaign wunderkind. What it all comes down to is a knock down drag out battle for survival... what- at least in the view of Clooney (the film's director)- is the essence of today's politics.
If even half the stuff that goes down in the movie is true, then not only has the American political system fallen into disrepair, one cam make an argument that American society has failed. Clooney isn't- as far as I can tell- making accusations at any one particular candidate. There are some ripped from the headlines scandals on display here, as well as some vague allusions to very real political candidates, but on the whole, Clooney is merely using these as plot devices. I don't think Clooney is trying to bring anyone in specific down- so to speak- but rather to use the disrepair of the American political system as a backdrop to his engrossing (and believable) thriller. And... the tactic works. Or, at least in my view, it isn't as distracting as it could have been to try and figure out at whom Clooney is pointing. Clooney is proving himself to be a master story-teller as both an actor and a director and, as such, he isn't in any need of such gimmickry to sell the story. I was completely riveted to the screen watching to see- when the dust finally settled- who the winner was going to be... no, not of the Ohio Primary, but of the do-or-die battle of personalities waged from within the campaign as well as from the outside (including both Morris' Democratic foe Senator Pullman [Michael Mantell] and campaign team led by manager Tom Duffy [Paul Giamatti] and the press personified by the scoop-obsessed reporter, Ida Horowicz [Marisa Tomei]). Every character has something to lose here, perhaps even more than they stand to gain should they come out on top. To their credit, Clooney and company aren't very interested in turning this into a twisting/turning whodunit story. No one's hand is kept entirely secret. The treat is watching it all unfold. And a hell of a treat it is.
In the end, with a gripping, intense story, punctuated by a stable of reliably excellent actors and actresses there really isn't much to dislike about the movie. The winking look behind the shimmering idealistic curtain of the American political process revealing the gritty, grimy "glory" of what "actually" can happen as acandidate desperately pursues this country's top office is the cherry on top of the fantastic movie sundae. The only problem the movie had (other than the fleeting sense that maybe it was a bit much for one campaign to experience all that shit hitting the fan) was that it had to end... and that there really isn't any guarantee that there will be others of similar quality to follow in its wake... one can only hope...
Grade: A+
No comments:
Post a Comment