George Clooney in The Ides of March
Half the liberals I know want George Clooney to be President of the United States. He's got the wit and charisma of a born politician and is solidly left of center — or left of the right, which these days is the center — enough to appeal to Democrats who have slunk into despondency watching Barack Obama co-opt positions that Republicans have long cherished and then rejected because he proposed them. But for now the star seems content in the job of Hollywood's near permanent ambassador to the Venice Film Festival. For the sixth time in nine years, a Clooney picture is glamorizing the world's most venerable movie bash. Following Intolerable Cruelty in 2003, Good Night, and Good Luck in 2005, Michael Clayton in 2007, Burn After Reading in 2008 and The Men Who Stare at Goats in 2009, Clooney — who keeps a villa in nearby Lake Como — returns as star and director of the smart political drama The Ides of March.
One of the wrinkles in next year's Democratic primary season — if Obama runs uncontested — is that, for the first time in ages, no major candidate will be rolling out the fiery liberal rhetoric that is the party's old-time religion. In this movie's coverage of a few days in an Ohio primary, Pennsylvania governor and presidential candidate Mike Morris throws exactly that red meat to the blue staters. Raised Catholic but now proudly agnostic, Morris fervently — or since he is played by favorite son Clooney, flintily — embraces abortion rights, the welfare state and the end of the internal-combustion engine. And unlike Presidents Clinton and Obama, who shared a tragic appetite for universal acceptance, even from those who hated them on sight, Morris is comfortable running on what he believes. If you don't want to vote for someone with my positions, he says, don't vote for me. "In fact, don't vote for me at all."
Ryan Gosling in Ides of March
Actually, that's not Morris speaking; it's his second in command, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), joking as he sits in for the candidate during a sound check before a TV debate between Morris and Senator Pullman, his chief primary rival. The two campaigns are run by little fat men: Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) for Morris, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) for Pullman. Stephen is different: 30, fit and a comer. What Murray Kempton wrote of JFK in the 1960 primary — "He is fresh and everyone else is tired" — applies to Stephen, who fights to balance idealism with a terrier's determination. Keeping his options open, he takes a secret meeting with Duffy and entertains the offer of a job with the Pullman camp. And fulfilling the dogma that politics is a great place to meet girls, Stephen falls into a noncommittal affair with a 20-year-old staffer, Holly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood). He is not the only one who has shared her affections.
As director, Clooney fills the screen with the harried milling of any campaign and amps up the verisimilitude with appearances by TV talking heads Rachel Maddow, Charlie Rose and Chris Matthews. Clooney sees blustering bustle and edgy familiarity — giant closeups of private conversations — as the contrasts of political campaigns, which are, at heart, all rhetoric and no accountability. (That's the winner's burden.) Clooney wants to get across that any campaign is a compromise: persuading voters who don't agree on much to agree on voting for this one guy. And the candidate is, by job description, the compromiser in chief. A New York Times reporter (Marisa Tomei), steeped in the cynicism of her trade, says as much about Morris to Stephen: "He's a politician. He'll let you down, sooner or later."
The script by Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, from Willimon's play Farragut North, exists in the anachronistic world of traditional Democratic primaries as observed in Gore Vidal's The Best Man, Jeremy Larner's The Candidate and the Garry Trudeau — Robert Altman Tanner '88. The Tea Party is never mentioned; the closest The Ides of March gets to today's dirty skirmishes comes when Zara explains why Democrats lose to the more disciplined and ruthless Republicans: "They're afraid to get in the mud with the f — -ing elephants." The big suspense here is: Who gets to be Karl Rove? Still, this is a movie, not a docudrama; viewers should be pleased that the compromising positions of sexual politics receive more emphasis than a candidate's stand on the debt ceiling.
Clooney knows as well as anyone that acting is politics; both depend on salesmanship, on letting the public think they have a clue to your personality. Clooney's patented tic, in a movie or an interview, comes in that microsecond before he answers a question, when his mouth betrays an emotion that might be ironic or exasperated, but instantly relaxes into the famously open, indulgent smile. That mannerism is on full display in The Ides of March, not just in Clooney's performance but in Gosling's as well. It's not a natural fit, since the young actor, acclaimed in indie circles for roles in The Believer, Half Nelson, Lars and the Real Girl and Blue Valentine, is an intense Method man who has never relaxed for a moment onscreen.
But Gosling has studied Clooney's ease in being watched and adored and his surface charm (which in movie stars we call real charm). Clooney has it; Gosling's trying to learn it. All this is appropriate to the character of Stephen, who has Morris' drive and a little of his star quality. Gradually, Gosling acquires the Clooney twinkle, the simulation of intimacy, the effect of gravitas — which is to say, the actor's ability to deceive. With Clooney's connivance, and in a film stuffed with savvy work by veteran players, Gosling pulls the movie away from Morris and into Stephen's mind, where angels swim and demons lurk. The Ides of March says that American politics, no less than Italian, is a beachfront property with sharks surfing the waves. That makes this skeptical, savory movie a fitting offering from Hollywood's suavest ambassador to Venice and the world.