The Ides of March

A Pretty Face in the Crowd

The Ides of March
Grade: B -
Starring: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.


Despite the implication of its title, George Clooney's new film, The Ides of March, is only obliquely connected to the mother of all tales of political skulduggery, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It does have a Brutus, however, a 30-year-old political operative named Stephen Myers, the media adviser to the presidential primary campaign of Mike Morris, ultra-liberal governor of Pennsylvania.


Buoyed by populist positions on the environment and America's oil dependency, Morris (played by Clooney) is the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination heading into the crucial Ohio primary in the month of March. Morris is also an avowed atheist, setting the film sometime around the year, I dunno, Not in My Lifetime A.D.


We're constantly told that Stephen (played by the suddenly ubiquitous Ryan Gosling) is a political wunderkind. Still, the only proof provided of his genius is a cynical national service scheme, breakable since those impacted by Morris’ failure to implement the program aren’t old enough to vote. Of course, this ignores the fact that both they and the parents left footing the bill will be able to vote in four years during President Morris’ reelection.


In the midst of the Ohio campaign, Stephen succumbs to the advances of Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), a fetching 20-year-old intern and daughter of the DNC's chairman. It is also around this time that he makes the ludicrously naive mistake of agreeing to a clandestine meeting with Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the campaign manager for Morris' opponent, a fact Stephen fails to promptly reveal to his boss and mentor, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The series of betrayals and recriminations that follow push the film through its suspenseful paces.


The Ides of March is an adaptation of Beau Willimon's 2008 play Farragut North, loosely based on the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean. Directed by Clooney from a screenplay he wrote with his Good Night, and Good Luck collaborator Grant Heslov, the film is a polished potboiler that produces moments of brilliance—a scene in which Morris receives a call from a deceased character's cellphone during the press conference assembled to announce that person's death is a sequence that would do Hitchcock proud.


Otherwise, Clooney's films still have a tendency to lurch and discount nuance in a trite, often ham-fisted hunt for the big twist or big metaphor. Characters rendezvous at public park benches for top-secret meetings. Air turbulence during a plane flight is conjoined with the onset of trouble in the Morris campaign. At the conclusion of one scene, Clooney holds the image of Stephen's silhouette cast against the backdrop of a giant American flag a beat too long, to the point that any symbolism of the moment starts giving way to parody.


Nevertheless, Clooney's main asset as a director is his power to recruit a crackerjack cast. Hoffman and Giamatti are utterly at ease playing wily but burned-out politicos—I left wanting a movie that focused on them. Wood gives her best performance since The Wrestler, even if Molly is written as a two-note character who morphs from sassy, feckless sexpot into tortured innocent, despite the fact that the events that propel her character had already occurred when she meets Stephen. Meaty if underwritten roles are ably filled by Marisa Tomei, as a hard-bitten New York Times reporter, and Jeffrey Wright, playing an ambitious Southern senator with enough delegates in his back pocket to sway the election. Clooney himself wisely underplays his screen time, which heightens the impact of his bountiful charisma whenever he appears.


Gosling is capable as always, yet his performance is also undercut by the screenplay. Shakespeare's treatment of Julius Ceasar's trusted confidant-turned-assassin is a complex portrait of altruism tinged with naïveté. By contrast, Stephen proves an opportunist of jarring, disjointed absolutes, a loyal idealist who too easily casts aside his principles to keep his seat in the political game and, yes, further the filmmakers' agenda.


The Ides of March is part of a long lineage of behind-the-scenes political dramas, including State of the Union, All the King's Men, The Candidate and especially Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' adaptation of a roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 run for the White House. However, Clooney's movie is intended for interpretation through a more contemporary prism. Three years into the Obama presidency, Clooney, long a poster child for limousine liberalism, makes a movie about a Democratic candidate whose high-minded oratory belies someone who, when pressed, surrenders his ideals for the sake of political expedience and self-preservation. It seems that leveling cynicism toward the current administration has become as fashionable for progressives as when they used to heap indignation onto the previous one. Beware The Ides of March, for scorned liberals, as Marc Antony might say, are all "honourable men."
 
Neil Morris

The Conspirator

I thought the statute of limitations had
run on my "Santa Barbara" days

Grade: C +

Director: Robert Redford

Starring: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, Alexis Bledel, Justin Long, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Huston, and Kevin Kline

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

Not until about 20 minutes into The Conspirator do you realize why Robert Redford, a film legend and activist whose recent interests have skewed more political than cinematic, would direct a historical drama about the trial of one of the conspirators behind Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

The opening act is a well-crafted, authentic recounting of the conspiracy to simultaneously murder Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson, culminating with John Wilkes Booth gunning down Lincoln inside Ford’s Theatre. Redford’s impressive attention to detail, here and throughout the film, includes the wooden brace Booth used to jam the door leading to Lincoln’s theater box, the diagonal placement of Lincoln on the bed inside William Peterson’s boarding house because the president was too tall to lie straight, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) ordering a hysterical Mary Lincoln out of the room housing her dying husband.

As Booth and his cohorts are rounded up, the government eventually beats a path to a D.C. boarding house run by Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) where the assassination plot was allegedly hatched. Under orders from Seward, Surratt is tried before a military tribunal where she is not allowed to testify in her own defense, and neither she nor her attorney, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), are privy to the prosecution’s evidence prior to trial.

It’s only when the storyline shifts focuses onto this Gitmo-style simulacrum, with Seward playing the part of a 19^th century mash-up of Cheney and Rumsfeld, that Redford’s motives become far clearer than those of his characters. Aiken, a former Union soldier, is cast as a war hero and idealist, but the only adversity he suffers for his unpopular defense of Surratt is excommunication from his gentleman’s club and the occasional anxiety of his fiancée (Alexis Bledel).

Meanwhile, we are left puzzling over Mary’s Mary’s relationship with her son John (Johnny Simmons) and daughter Anna (Evan Rachel Wood), both of whom seem strangely reluctant to come to their mother’s aid. Further, why does every Southern character speak with such a clichéd drawl –Tom Wilkinson’s senator from Maryland sounds as if he was voice-coached by Foghorn Leghorn.

As some evidence of Mary’s culpability gradually emerges, writer James Solomon waffles between defending Mary’s innocence and indicting the legal apparatus erected to prosecute her, the latter a more bloodless endeavor. Make no mistake: there is unfairness here that deserves contempt regardless of Mary’s guilt, such as the external influence exerted to assure a death sentence in lieu of life imprisonment.

However, Redford’s rendering is so captivated by its historical heft that it forgets to engage its audience in the figures at the center of its diorama. The trial and hanging of Mary Surratt is an important, nearly forgotten episode of American jurisprudence. The Conspirator, on the other hand, is more likely to have you scouring Wikipedia than IMDb.com.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at Indyweek.com: http://goo.gl/yqIFK

Whatever Works

You remind me of my stepdaughter. Will you marry me?

Grade: D –

Director: Woody Allen

Starring: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, and Ed Begley Jr.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

When will Woody Allen stop subjecting us to cinematic vehicles used to justify marrying his twenty-something stepdaughter? Yes, I know Allen supposedly wrote the screenplay for Whatever Works in the 1970s, and, indeed, its hoary air reeks of the bottom of the musty desk drawer that coughed up this misanthropic mistake. But, the story of an older man who finds himself in a May-December relationship with a comely ingénue he finds literally camped out on his stoop oozes with self-absorbed psychoanalysis.

If you ever wondered about the cosmic neuroticism that would emerge if Larry David were cast in a Woody Allen film, then Whatever Works is your answer. David plays Boris Yelnikoff, the standard-issue Allen stand-in, who ambles around Greenwich Village on a bum leg injured during a failed suicide attempt, spouting off random invectives against virtually everything and everyone, from health-conscious diets to religious zealots, from fear of terrorism to the young children to whom he futilely tries to teach chess. He boorishly peppers his vocabulary by incessantly labeling his intellectual inferiors “morons,” “cretins,” and “inchworms.” He even regularly breaks the fourth wall, wondering aloud why we, the audience, would bother buying tickets to watch a movie about his sad, uninteresting life story. Only the legion of Allen apologists would disagree.

Enter Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a NYC newcomer and former Southern beauty pageant queen with no money or board. Melodie charms her way into Boris’ brownstone and, eventually, his hardened heart. They eventually marry (although, curiously, Allen never captures a single moment of romantic intimacy between them, even a kiss), much to the chagrin of Melodie’s estranged, fundamentalist parents, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and John (Ed Begley Jr.).

Allen’s humorless, often unwatchable homage to secular humanism plays like bad community theater. The acerbic wit and browbeaten charm David embodies in Curb Your Enthusiasm turns dissonant in Allen’s hands. Wood occasionally flashes her innate acumen, but she suffers from a simplistic role and a hackneyed accent that sounds like something straight out of an episode of Hee Haw. Indeed, Boris/Allen’s constant barrage against Southerners is both artless and elitist. (At some one, Marietta tells Melodie she’s “living like a sharecropper.”)

From atop Allen’s lofty intellectual perch, a taste of Greenwich Village is all that is required to save Melodie and family from their backward, moralistic ways. Marietta dons a beret, finds her inner artiste, and carries on an open ménage à trois with two men. John, meanwhile, undergoes a ludicrous sexual awakening, realizing over drinks in a bar – and with virtually no sense of emotional turmoil – that he is homosexual. He then launches into a relationship with the first gay guy he meets (a slapdash sequence that reveals the elemental underpinning beneath Allen’s ostensible high-mindedness).

“Whatever works” is Boris’ credo about life and the search for happiness. To Allen’s ham-fisted handiwork, the only appropriate response is “whatever…”

Neil Morris

The Wrestler

Mickey Rourke impersonates his recent career trajectory

Grade: A
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

In The Wrestler, a down and out bum grasps for one more shot at glory. The seemingly small but significant difference between director Darren Aronofsky’s new film and similarly situated films like The Champ, Rocky, and Cinderella Man is that boxing carries an esteem that professional wrestling lacks. Boxing is known as the "sweet science," fought under the "Marquis of Queensbury" rules, and popularized by culturally and politically transcendent figures such as Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali.

By contrast, the most prevalent remark made about pro wrestling is, "You know it's fake." It is popular among its rabid devotees; otherwise, it carries a stigma of being silly, trashy, and degrading. Some call the spectacle a "soap opera for men,” but perhaps the better label is "performance art.” The stagecraft in pro wrestling is predetermined, and the characters and storylines are written and choreographed for the viewers' pleasure. There is another vocation that also fits this description: Acting.

The Wrestler is foremost a character study of an aging grappler, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, played with raw authenticity by Mickey Rourke. However, under Aronofsky’s brilliant direction, the film itself becomes its own kind of performance art with a connecting thread that weaves the subject-matter, plot, characters, and actors into a seamless tapestry.

Aronofsky's prestige as a director was already cemented after the release of his 2000 tour de force, Requiem for a Dream. For The Wrestler, Aronofsky dials back his trademark visual flourishes for a gritty depiction of loss: of youth, fame, family, and, yes, dreams. Once the most popular wrestler in the country, Randy is now a relic living in near-poverty who spends his workweek stocking shelves at a grocery store in his rural Jersey hometown. Whereas Randy once fought before sold-out audiences in Madison Square Garden, he now spends his weekends scrapping for scratch at local armories and high school gyms.

After an especially brutal match accompanied by glass shards, metal staples, and barbed wire, Randy suffers a heart attack that forces him to hang up his tights and cancel an upcoming rematch against his former MSG foe, the Ayatollah (real name Bob, now a used car salesman). Facing a new reality, Randy attempts to advance his relationship with a local stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), and reconnect with his estranged daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood).

The real-life parallels between character and actor are striking and likely intentional. Aronofsky risked cancellation of this film project with his insistence on casting Rourke, because producers and financiers were reluctant to invest in the notoriously tempestuous and evidently washed-up actor. As it turns out, Rourke visage bears the scars of real-life amateur boxing, botched plastic surgeries, and hard-living like a mask, doubling for Randy's years of ring injuries and steroid abuse. Like Randy, this is Rourke's attempt to recapture faded glory, and the end result is sensational. Rourke compliments extremely physical wrestling scenes - no stunt-work here, even when Randy must cut himself to draw blood during a fight - with intimate moments of charm, sensitivity, and vulnerability.

Cassidy does not turn the heads of younger customers as she once did, much like the now 40-something Tomei finds herself losing roles to a younger crop of actresses. And, Wood's own strained relationship with her father, Raleigh playwright and actor Ira David Wood, undoubtedly informed her brief, but spot-on performance here. When a tired and hurt Stephanie finally tells Randy, "I don’t love you; I don’t even like you. There is no more fixing this; it’s broke…permanently," the line practically crackles with verisimilitude. (Wood has been quoted as saying this role was a kind of "paid therapy" that led her to recently reconnect with her dad).

Fact meets thinly-veiled fiction throughout The Wrestler, never more than a bar-scene during which the pall over Randy and Cassidy's lives is temporarily lifted to the strains of Ratt's "Round and Round" playing on the jukebox. "F****n' 80's man, best s**t ever!", exclaims Cassidy. "Bet'chr ass man," says Randy. "I'll tell you somethin', I hate the f****n' 90's."

Unable to cope with life outside the squared circle, the film's finale manages to be both tragic and inspirational, hitting you like a 'Ram Jam' to the solar plexus. Whether you call it the rebirth of Rourke or Requiem for the '80s, The Wrestler has all the right moves. "They don't make em' like they used to," laments Randy/Rourke. Bet'chr ass, man.

Neil Morris