The Ides of March

Editorial

Who better than George Clooney to produce, co-write and direct a cool, sophisticated, political drama, and to play a polished candidate to boot? To an extent, The Ides Of March — adapted from a play by former staffer to a Presidential hopeful Beau Willimon — lives up to the considerable Clooney rep. It is at face-value a mature, intelligent thriller with some meat on its bones and a big-ticket ensemble cast. And a little sex.

And despite its Shakespearean allusions in the big themes (the Ides Of March is the date Roman conspirators ended Julius Caesar's imperial ambitions), some of its plot points are either as implausible or as predictable as those you could expect in any shiny Hollywood drama of ambition. Ryan Gosling's Myers is young for his role as press secretary in a state governor's campaign to become the Democratic Party's nominee in the next Presidential election. Despite his youth, he's a genius at working the media, yet this ultra-savvy political animal is as naive as a starry-eyed schoolboy.

Discovering a flaw in his candidate's character, the idealist Myers overreacts like an unstable fanboy who has been shunned by the object of his obsession. The depth of his sudden betrayal marks a turnaround of almost unfathomable dimension, excused away with the line, "Revenge makes people unpredictable." And then on top of these bothers, Evan Rachel Wood's delicious, precociously smart-alec intern plotline seems tied off too quickly in this paranoid, investigative age in which nothing even a teeny bit potentially scandalous is let go.

This is not intended to be a political tale but a Faustian one, where the young protagonist sells his soul to keep doing what he knows is wrong, ideology and integrity be damned. The quality of the cast and the direction are superior. The content, more average.

Angie Errigo