The Ides of March

In George Clooney's The Ides of March (2011), we learn a valuable lesson about how politics is a dirty game that sullies everyone involved. This will come as a revelation to everyone who lives under a rock. While the subterranean may be shocked - shocked! - by its message, surface-dwellers will detest this dull, dramatically inert film.

Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) is a campaign staffer for Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), a charismatic, idealistic Presidential contender. Morris is naive enough to believe Morris is a savior, but soon finds out that Mr. Dooley's epigram - "Politics ain't beanbag" - is as valid as ever. Campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) will do anything to get the endorsement of a popular Senator (Jeffrey Wright), rival campaign boss Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) tries to bring Stephen over to his side, and intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood) has a secret that could destroy Morris's campaign. Stephen must get down in the gutter with them to come out on top.

The Ides of March's biggest miscalculation is passing off common wisdom as profound insight. A satire like The Best Man seems quaint today, but has the excuse of coming from a more innocent time. In the era of 24 hour news media and the blogosphere, when Barack Obama and John Boehner couldn't schedule breakfast without a fillibuster, Ides comes off as insightful as a dime-store psychic. A satire would be one thing, but Ides plays this absolutely straight.

Ides might get away with this if it weren't completely devoid of drama. The script is packed with stilted dialogue: the scenes of political players scheming and lecturing one another grow old really fast, while the "human" moments (Stephen and Molly's flirtations) seem written by cyborgs who learned human behavior from Google searches. Non-stop profanity only highlights the lousiness of the non-cuss words. Worse, the characters are interchangably obnoxious, preventing any investment in or engagement by them. The central melodrama plays as a desperate ploy for audience involvement, but it undermines the movie's docudrama posturing.

Ryan Gosling is an expressionless plank of wood. Not only is he given the most obvious arc imaginable, he scarcely changes his facial expression or raises his voice over the course of the film. It's the same performance as Drive without the face-stomping, which is completely wrong. It requires more than a droopy eyelid to pull off this sort of character.

The supporting cast isn't much better. George Clooney is such a cipher that the revelation of his evildoing comes as no suprirse. Evan Rachel Wood (Across the Universe) isn't so much a character as a trite plot pawn. Good actors like Paul Giamatti (John Adams), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson's War) and Jeffrey Wright (Quantum of Solace) struggle with underwritten characters. Marisa Tomei plays a conniving journalist, as if the film didn't have enough cliches.

The Ides of March is a sub-Stanley Kramer message film for the incurably obtuse. Is there anyone alive still so naive about our political process that this "expose" will shock? All you need to do to dispell this is turn on CNN.