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

Drive

That's okay...I'll just use the one downstairs

Grade: B +

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks and Oscar Isaac

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

The narrative chassis supporting Drive is the sort of heist-gone-wrong story that Hollywood has made and remade a thousand times. As a parable about greed and its unintended, even violent consequences, there’s not a lot of daylight between it and the typical Coen brothers film – a Sophie’s choice offered near the end of Drive closely mirrors the one Anton Chigurh extends to Llewelyn in No Country for Old Men.

The pleasure of this vehicle is a matter of style, not substance. Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising) fills his noir-ish fable with muscle cars and a nihilistic L.A. tableau, playing to the European penchant for stylized cinematic renderings of American culture. In this context, it is little surprise that Refn won the Best Director Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Based on James Sallis’ 2005 novel, the plot revolves around a taciturn Stuntman with No Name (Ryan Gosling) who also exploits his skill behind the wheel at night as a hired getaway driver. Credited as “Driver,” the part-time auto mechanic takes a shine to Irene (Carey Mulligan), a lonely mom living with her son Benicio in an apartment two doors down.

When Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison, he carries home a debt still owed to mob-connected cons back in the big house. This triggers a series of increasingly harrowing events as Driver battles to protect Irene and her moppet from reprisal.

Picking out the cinematic influences becomes its own parlor game during Drive’s more meditative moments – the film feels much longer than its 100-minute running time. Refn marries the ironic action styling of Luc Besson’s early work with the bloody ultra-violence of Sam Peckinpah, although Driver is less emblematic of David Sumner in Straw Dogs than a steely-eyed, slightly unhinged Steve McQueen. Indeed, Refn credits the McQueen classic Bullitt as an inspiration, along with the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Discerning viewers will also spy sidelong references to Williams Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., Walter Hill and the sort of kitschy ‘80s action films that Bernie Ross (Albert Brooks), a film producer turned cold-blooded gangster, says he used to make.

The ultimate engine propelling Drive beyond its visual and aural stylings is Gosling’s portrayal. The young actor takes what in lesser hands would be a typical movie tough-guy role and, (blessed) with minimal dialogue, transforms it into a character full of charm, complexities and contradictions reminiscent of De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

That same surreal, contradictory air extends to Drive as a whole, making it a film that may not appeal to the movie-going masses. However, those willing to go along for the ride will like where they end up.

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

Blue Valentine

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Grade: B +
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

A cursory glance at its title and attractive cast gives the impression that Blue Valentine might be a great date movie. But, to borrow the disclaimer from 500 Days of Summer, “this is not a love story.”

Although writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s Sundance sensation traverses Revolutionary Road’s same trail of marital disintegration, Blue Valentine is not some polished assault on 1950s Eisenhower-era conformity. Instead, it’s a raw, plaintive portrait of a romance’s heady birth and excruciating death rattle, cut from the gritty mold of John Cassavetes’ Faces and, to a lesser degree, A Woman Under Influence.

Even more significant is what’s not in the film. Missing is the maudlin middle, the answers to how Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) go from young, white hot lovers to a marriage so broken it’s just barely held together by parental obligation. Was it money, the stress of young parenthood, emotionally abuse, or simply a misapprehension of the degree of actual affection residing between two people ultimately bound together by an unexpected pregnancy? The cause(s) remains vague, if not unknown, as is often the case in real-life divorces whose demise remains cloaked in a fog of subfusc culprits.

Absent the usual narrative gimcracks, the film sometimes teeters on lapsing into lethargy and self-consciousness. What spares this latest tale of gangrenous romance from the same banality as, say, another movie about a down-and-shot boxer seeking one last shot at glory, is a slavish, almost discomforting realism portrayed by actors well equipped for the challenge. Gosling and Williams each essentially play two different characters, one in love’s early throes and another grappling with the fugue caused by its inextricable end.

Moreover, Cianfrance assigns a bit of gender reversal to his leads. Cindy is cast as the driven, sometimes self-centered partner who blames her home life for stifling her career dreams, while Dean’s single-minded focus on his role as spouse and parent, becomes an obsession that chokes out consideration for anything else life has to offer. On one hand, Dean morphs into an emotional troglodyte; on the other, he willingly emasculates himself for the sake of hearth and home and is made to suffer for it.

Cianfrance deploys the well-worn device of chronological hopscotching to tell this tale of love and marriage. This narrative back and forth works best when fashioned into a kind of call and response: e.g., Dean and Cindy’s first coitus is crosscut with a latter-day attempt to rekindle their marriage inside a cheesy, sci-fi-themed hotel suite. While the act they perform on this occasion is still, strictly speaking, sex, Gosling and Williams’ sublime execution fosters the feeling of pulling the plug on a comatose relationship.

You’re left half-wondering whether it was the cunnilingus or the sheer, aching sadness of the scene that prompted the rating board to nearly brand Blue Valentine with the scarlet NC-17. No matter: As with the rest of the film, it is the unknown that’s most compelling.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com - http://goo.gl/VxRcH