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

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

The Little Black Notebook

Grade: B

Director: Glenn Ficarra and John Requa

Starring: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Analeigh Tipton, Jonah Bobo, Marisa Tomei, and Kevin Bacon

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

The copious movie references – Dirty Dancing, The Graduate, The Karate Kid, even the difference between PG-13 and R-rated sex – sprinkled throughout Crazy, Stupid, Love. are more than mere comedic accoutrements. They are self-referential acknowledgements that in our pop culture-saturated society, the way we define the reality of romance is shaped by our force-fed perceptions of it.

This fable about love from directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris) begins with a breakup. While drowning away his sorrows following the bust-up of his 25-year marriage to Emily (Julianne Moore), Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a smooth-talking lothario who volunteers to be Cal’s makeover artist ex machina. Soon, Cal jettisons his knit shirts and New Balance sneakers for a smarter wardrobe and begins bedding barflies, including his son’s gonzo grade school teacher (Marisa Tomei). Soon, Jacob’s jaded view of love is rocked by a plucky redhead named Hannah (Emma Stone) after the two spent their first night together talking instead of other illicit activities.

There’s an unfair imbalance in the film’s allocation of marital accountability. Emily prompts the split with Cal, admitting an affair with a coworker (Kevin Bacon). [Compare this to Hannah leaving her longtime boyfriend (Josh Groban) because he didn’t pop the question in time and place she thought he should.] Yet, it’s Cal who leaves the family home to move into a nondescript apartment and whose subsequent foray into the single life is frowned upon by his friends and family. And, it’s Cal who is expected to bare his soul in public during an eighth-grade graduation that’s hijacked in order to hold a group therapy session.

The thoroughly capable cast embraces a blazingly whip-smart script by Dan Fogelman (Cars; Tangled), and that more justifies this romantic dramedy. However, once it starts teetering on contrivance and self-absorption, Crazy, Stupid, Love. leans too far in the direction of its first two adjectives.

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