When asked on the red carpet by Edith Bowman to describe his character, Mike Morris, Clooney said: "Well, he's a governor who looks a lot like me. And he wants to be president." It is primary season and in the polls, Morris is comfortably ahead of his rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Senator Pullman. His senior campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and junior campaign manager Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) are quietly confident but not enough to tell cynical New York Times hack Ida (Marisa Tomei) that they have it in the bag. Meanwhile, Pullman's campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) spots Meyers' potential and attempts to seduce him onto the Pullman campaign, setting into motion a complex and ultimately tragic course of events, with pretty, young intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who gets involved with Meyers, as collateral.
Too far away... George in the middle |
Guess the stars: Sandra Hebron, George Clooney, Beau Willimon, Evan Rachel Wood, Philip Seymour Hoffman |
I have, as ever, tried to avoid reading reviews of the film before writing this post but the impression I get is that people think The Ides of March is a good film but it could have been a great one. I imagine some will complain that it is too stagey (it is based on the Beau Willimon play Farragut North) but I disagree. It is a tightly edited, well-acted political drama about power, trust, ambition and betrayal. Ryan Gosling goes some way to proving he can carry a film, although he has strong support from Hoffman, whose Zara is very savvy and very good at his job but knows that eventually, he'll leave politics and walk into a cushy consultancy job. It is very much a boys' film — the two main female characters, Ida and Molly, are fairly two-dimensional: cynical journalist, ambitious-but-naive intern. And Clooney, of course, charms as Morris, saying the right things, appealing to the right people, and yet still doing the very human thing of messing up royally.
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