George Clooney’s lone directorial blunder, Leatherheads (2008), is now long forgotten. With his latest, The Ides of March, he completes a trio of impressive films, beginning with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and continuing with the exemplary Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). With occasional writer partner Grant Heslov at his side, Clooney has framed an engrossing, meticulous screen adaptation of Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North.
In a reductive sense the film charts the drive of a Governor, Mike Morris (Clooney) to reach the White House, but uses this basic narrative as a framework within which a series of interconnected characters are subject to the complex, ethically dubious machinations of politics. The film pivots on highly ambiguous notions of moral integrity with Governor Morris mostly used as a chess piece around which the fascinatingly fluid alliances of the other players must bend.
You’d hard pressed to assemble a more respected, critically acclaimed collective of actors to carry out the demands of an adult film of this quality. These include Philip Seymour Hoffman as Morris’ campaign manager, Paul Zara, Paul Giamatti as his counterpart Tom Duffy, and Evan Rachel Wood as the Morris intern who becomes a key figure in the twisty drama that transpires. However, despite the heavyweight credentials of his co-stars, lead Ryan Gosling as Morris’ second in charge, Stephen Meyers, continues to emphatically prove how adept he is at handling the diversity of great roles gifted to him in recent times.
It is Meyers whose idealistic notions of the political campaign and his own motivations in serving it that get turned on their head most alarmingly by the end of the film. But this transformation epitomises the journey for all the main characters a process whereby our perception of them must undergo radical re-assessment as the narrative reaches one turn after another.
It’s this element of surprise and unpredictability that makes The Ides of March (2011). Not only do the many non-derivative plot twists keep you riveted to your seat but it becomes a constant guessing game as who will fulfil the prescribed ‘black’ and ‘white’ roles that so many mediocre films have conditioned us to expect.
Thankfully, complexities abound in Clooney’s finest film to date. Of invaluable assistance is Alexandre Desplat’s typically proficient, perfectly-pitched score, which never overplays, even by the finest margin, the tenseness of certain scenes. This is a magnificent piece of cinema, engaging from first frame to last, in which naivety is forcefully disabused of its fragile reading of the true nature of man. A standout film in this year of 2011.
I say:
Simply put, one of the more accomplished dramas of recent years.
See it for:
The extraordinary craft responsible for this outstanding work: flawless performances, superb direction, and a magnificent screenplay. Let the superlatives run free…
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