George Clooney’s latest film, The Ides of March, is a political drama starring himself, Ryan Gosling, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film is centered on the campaign of Governor Mike Morris, played by Clooney, who is running for the Democratic nomination for the President of the United States. Gosling plays his Junior Campaign Manager Stephen Meyers who struggles with loyalty to a cause and his own principals. The film has a great premise, and could have been among the best of the year, but unfortunately it falls flat.
The story never takes time to really develop the characters. Each character is just a hollow subject to get us from point A to point B. This has to be the weakest factor of the film. The story simply moves too fast. It felt like the writer took a five episode mini-series and compressed it to a standard one hundred minute film. If they had just added twenty extra minutes, they would have had time to expand the characters motivations and personalities.
The characters are so under developed that when the audience learns that Evan Rachel Wood’s character, Molly, has had an affair with Morris and now is pregnant and needs an abortion, we don’t care. This moment becomes nothing more than a plot device. Meyers gives her money for the abortion and covers it up only because he believes in the campaign and what it stands for. This would have been a great insight to his character, if we cared.
Molly eventually kills herself after Meyers exiles her from the campaign and himself. This should have triggered a major emotional response, but it didn’t. Molly’s death was also just another plot device. Meyers uses this information to blackmail Morris and get to the top of the campaign, which is what I expected him to do, but I still didn’t care that he backstabbed his best friend. We get the idea that this is supposed to be the moment when the hero turns his back on everything he believes in and becomes what he fought against, but the film doesn’t exactly get there. We have no sympathy for him by this point, but never did to begin with.
The Ides of March isn’t an entirely bad film. The acting, directing, editing, is all top notch. George Clooney is a great actor and usually a great director. Ryan Gosling is believable in his role and does a great job at it; we just don’t feel anything for him. This is mainly because of the writing, but is also a failure on the director’s side.
The film looks also amazing. There is a scene shot in the rain looking into Meyer’s car and it is beautiful. The acting is great, the shot structure, lighting, and color palette all fit the scene and convey great emotion, but it is all lost when the story elements are brought into it. There are shots of Clooney lit from behind on a stage with the American flag, and a gorgeous shot of Hoffman and Gosling silhouetted against a back lit flag, which almost worth struggling to through the movie to see, but these still do not save the film.
The Ides of March could have been great, but poor writing causes it to fall flat. The characters are two dimensional and don’t command any emotional response from the audience. The actors in the film are very good, and the cinematographer deserves an award, but that doesn’t make up for the bad characterization. The pristine quality of the mechanical aspects of the film mean absolutely nothing if we do not care about the characters. The Ides of March proves that just because a film looks great, it doesn’t mean it is great.
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