“The Ides of March”… The evil that men do

George Clooney, the director of The Ides of March, has nicked his title from the wrong Shakespeare play. He might have called the film The Tempest; this is, after all, the story of a fast-brewing storm that threatens to capsize the campaign of Mike Morris (Clooney), a Democratic presidential aspirant. (The events of the narrative unfold as the Ohio primary is a week way.) There is a hint of Love’s Labours Lost in the fledgling liaison between Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), Morris’ earnest and hero-worshipping second-in-command, and the intern Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood). A Winter’s Tale? Perhaps. Regard the frosting over of once-sunny idealists, now made gravely aware that the ascent to the White House is a pitiless march over the piled-up corpses of men and women with principles. Orchestrating a presidential campaign from the mountaintop of idealism is, unsurprisingly, a midsummer night’s dream. But Julius Caesar this featherweight political fable is certainly not.

Clooney spins a story woven around American political headlines down the years, and its title seems to be a simple function of the Shakespearean plot points touched at: a comradeship gone awry, a golden god revealed to have feet of clay, a Senatorial pit filled with scheming vipers, and numerous shots of backroom conspiring targeted at aiding as well as annihilating the man at the top. The best such shot has Morris addressing a large gathering, standing against a proscenium-sized backdrop of the American flag; on the other side of the red, white and blue, Myers and Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the campaign’s manager, debate a heated issue that could scorch Morris. The setup shines a shrewd spotlight on the theatrical nature of the political game, where the candidate plays his part to a rapt audience and the writers manipulate the show from behind the curtain. The highlights of the film are these conversations – between Myers and Zara, Myers and Stearns, Myers and the rival campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), and crucially, between Myers and Morris.

Clooney goes in for deep close-ups during these dialogues, and later, to showcase the whirring machinery sustaining Morris’ campaign, he pulls back for extravagant tracking shots, following the staff in and out of headquarters. The technique is classy, the acting is superb, and the film is certainly entertaining – but only in the most superficial sense. For a tragic drama about idealism lost, the characters have all the heft of corks bobbing on water, swept along a current of cheap dramaturgy. The audience is always two steps ahead. We don’t need the cynical reporter played by Marisa Tomei to tell us, “They all let you down sooner or later.” Is anyone shocked anymore that something is rotten in the state of Democracy? The title makes us imagine a steelier tale than this one, which feels like a minor subplot wrested from a more mordant chronicle about the political machine. They should have called this Much Ado about Nothing.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2011 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Posted in: Cinema: Review (English)