Power corrupts … and political power corrupts absolutely. I am not sure there is a moral lesson to be learned from The Ides of March. If anything, it might be “stay the hell out of politics” (a lesson that I as a Poly-Sci major never had to learn first hand). By the time the end credits rolled, I am not sure I even want to drive through Washington, D.C. on my way to the next Redskins home game. George Clooney, who continues to grow as a director, poses some difficult questions about the American political system, and does so in a way that makes viewers want to stay far away from their local polling place come November.
Ryan Gosling is Stephen Myers, a political advisor working on the campaign of Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), candidate to be the Democratic nominee in the next Presidential race. Myers is second to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Paul Zara, the gruff senior political advisor. When intern Molly Stearns (an amazing Evan Rachel Wood) starts making trouble, it is only one of several challenges that Myers has to contend with as his life quickly starts crashing around him.
The rest of the cast is just as stellar. Paul Giamatti plays rival campaign manager Tom Duffy, who might just be trying to recruit his opponent’s star advisor. Marisa Tomei is reporter Ida Horowicz, who doesn’t mind being used as a pawn in Duffy and Zara’s game of chess, as long as she gets the story. Almost criminally underused was Jeffery Wright as North Carolina Senator Thompson, who has control of enough delegates to turn the tide of the nomination fight for either candidate, but whose support comes with a very high price.
While The Ides of March has an incredible ensemble, it really is Gosling’s movie. He is much better here than in the vastly overrated Drive (an opinion I don’t think is going to be very popular). What his character experiences during the film changes him in ways that he’d never imagined. The oddest part about how his character is constructed was that he wasn’t some wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-off-the-bus idealist as you would expect in this type of story. He was experienced enough in ways of Washington to have worked his way to second-in-command of a national campaign. That he could withstand 10 years or so in the District while retaining his idealism (or naiveté, if you’re taking the more realistic view) says something both about his character in general, and exactly how destructive the events of the film are.
As much as The Ides of March is about Gosling’s Myers, it is Wood’s performance that I can’t get out of my head. She was distractingly good here. As mature as the character pretended to be, she was still so incredibly young and fragile underneath. Her beauty (and let’s face it, she’s just plain damn gorgeous) made the character’s arc that much more complex. As the daughter of another powerful political figure (played by Gregory Itzin), she has grown up in this world, has matured in this world, and yet gets in way over her head when allowed to live in it unsupervised. The Ides of March is a tough movie to watch (not because it is bad, not by a long shot, but because it is so dark), but I want to watch again just to see Wood’s perfect portrayal once again.
There’s a line of dialogue from the film that I won’t get right, so I’ll paraphrase. Powerful politicians can get away with almost anything, but there is one rule that they can’t break: Don’t fool around with the interns (a very PG version of the quote, I might add). It is scary to ponder exactly how much the world’s most powerful people can get away with. I’m reminded of a point made in Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders: the people that are drawn to this type of power are so rarely the type of people that the public would want to entrust it to.
If the lesson of The Ides of March is to “stay the hell out of politics” like I posited earlier, what does that say about the future of our political system? The movie was brilliantly adapted from the play Farragut North, which was based on the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean. However there were homages in the film that brought Barack Obama to mind (who is the only real life politician who’s half as good with words as Clooney’s Morris). Not to say that there’s negative implications towards the President, just politicians in general. It’s a testament to just how good the film was that it even made me skip The Daily Show this week.
Clacked by Ivey West 
on Oct 07, 2011 @ 00:00 EST5EDT
