DVD OF THE WEEK: The Ides of March

Beau Willimon's play Farragut North was completed in 2004, drawing from anecdotal dirt overheard working for the abortive campaign of brief Democratic great white hope Howard Dean. No theater bit until 2008, when a momentarily less apathetic liberal electorate ate it up. In co-writer and director George Clooney's version—now portentously titled The Ides of March—candidate Mike Morris (Clooney) has his face displayed on a Obama-modeled Shepherd Fairey backdrop, but the film isn't really plugged into the current moment so much as a recurring character in Democratic politics; Morris' strength is his uncompromising, articulate liberalism, his weakness a compromised personal life.

The combination of impeccable populist righteousness and personal stupidity is reminiscent less of Dean or Obama than Bill Clinton (or more recently, John Edwards). Far before Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's potential to betray liberal idealists' hopes through unmanageable indiscretions was subject for fictional fodder. For Ides, the main precedent is Joe Klein's then-anonymous novel Primary Colors and the subsequent, overwrought 1998 Mike Nichols-Elaine May adaptation, with John Travolta's livewire Bubba copy alternately transparently idealistic sincere and (off-screen) undermining his potential.

Nichols' focus was split nearly equally between candidate and staff, but the balance tips heavily to the latter in Ides. Until staffer Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) accidentally discovers his picture-/strategy- perfect candidate has career-ending peccadillos, Morris seems like someone perfect for both private and professional life. New York Times reporter Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei) warns Stephen such a candidate doesn't exist: "He'll disappoint you," she cautions. "They always do." This is heavy foreshadowing, but Stephen's more surprised to learn that his own mirroring idealism—a desire to do whatever ethically possible to advance a perfect candidate—is as degradable as his hero's; Ides has been written off as a banal "power corrupts" sermon. Despite a seriously misguided third act—one bizarre twist after another, with the frequency of a Mamet play, delaying the moment when the moral lesson is finally delivered—Ides can be appreciated for its quiet first-hour dive into backroom negotiations and minute-by-minute damage control.

Working per usual with Steven Soderbergh's ace editor Stephen Mirrione, Clooney calmly pins down messy, bleary-eyed offices in static, unexcitable medium shots, reducing background sound to a faint murmur or nothing at all; Meyers and staff are insulated from whatever city they're actually in, even as within the offices factional loyalties add to the chaos. The showiest, purely visual manifestation of this is in a single shot of three offices, minutely adjusting the focus between three officials separated by glass but unable to hear what anyone else might be saying about them. Meyers is a whiz-kid strategist who does damage control first and only considers the ethical implications later, sealed in a political bubble that the movie itself mimics. (The pockets of quiet also help neutralize the effect of the rapid-fire, vaguely Sorkin-esque dialogue, which without interruptions can turn cloyingly clever.)

As in Primary Colors, a staff's gradual, deepening disappointment with its candidate mirrors the public's, and in both the fall from true believer to hardened pragmatist is overblown, leading to third acts with disproportionately tragic casualties (resembling nothing so much as the Bill Clinton-killed-Vince Foster conspiracy theories). Clooney's politician is background noise, though he certainly gives himself moments designed to rally left-wing audiences, unflinchingly defending social welfare programs and nailing the would-you-support-the-death-penalty-for-your-wife's-killer question that so flummoxed anti-charismatic 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. At a town hall meeting, he holds court expertly on what looks like a stage set—such events generally being, after all, staged dramas presumably demonstrating Democracy In Action. But Ides never lets viewers get swept up in the candidate's pull: it keeps the voters out of the picture, calmly dramatizing hired-hand cynicism the public normally only gets to read about after the election in book-length, campaign trail post-mortems.

Posted by ahillis at January 17, 2012 1:27 PM