My review of "The Ides of March." [View All]

[CTyankee]

This film owes a lot to "The Candidate" and "The Sweet Smell of Success" (without the film noir aspects, altho "Ides" does have a go at noir, esp. in the confrontation scene between Gosling and Clooney). In fact, it seemed to me to be a kind of tribute to both of those movies, but for different reasons. "The Candidate" revealed the idealistic, but personally flawed, candidate and presented an existential crisis we hadn't really seen in political movies until that time. "The Sweet Smell of Success" pretty much laid out the corruption of individuals attempting to "make it" in a high stakes environment. In both movies, women lose on such a huge scale.

You get it from the movie's outset that Gosling's character, a guy on the make in political campaigns, is already pretty much destined for the route he eventually takes to "success." He has the "look" in his eyes. He spouts increasingly empty little spurts of idealism about his candidate, but you have the feeling that, at the end of the day, this guy is gonna be a real hack, just like all the rest.

The sadness of the women's roles in all this is well portrayed, from the young intern's sexual bravado masking a personal crisis, to the candidate's trusting wife, to the young "replacement" intern's brief cameo at the end of the film, carrying coffee, we get to the essential sadness and tragedy of so many women, young and a bit older, caught up in political souless-ness. Clooney's film does justice to this predicament.

While all of the performances are superb, the knockout is Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his slightly unkempt winter jacket, standing forlorn and shaken in a snowy alley after learning of the destruction of his present career. His later scene with Gosling is superb and I hope it is a performance that gets him a nod from the Oscars in the Best Supporting Actor category. Some critics have complained that this is an "actors workshop" film, but hey, what is wrong with that?

So, yes, do see this. It is cynical and the story is an old one (altho in need of retelling every generation). Don't bring your daughter up to be a political campaign intern (get DVD's of both Sweet Smell and Candidate to show relevance!) and cheer up that you are not Ryan Gosling's character or someone anywhere near him (hearing his phone call is from his father he answers saying "Don't tell me somebody died."). We've known this story all along, but its retelling is pretty damn good.