Film review: The Ides of March (15)

AFTER The Thick Of It, House Of Cards and West Wing, can we still be shocked when politicians wheel and backstab, their press officers spin, and a few lambs get sacrificed along the way?

Evidently George Clooney thinks that’s the case. He directed, co-wrote, produced and co-stars in The Ides Of March, where his handsome, plausible liberal Mike Morris is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president.

Ides Of March won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know about politics being a dirty business, but it does allow Clooney to toy with his image as the smoothiechops everyone would vote for. In Ides of March he’s agnostic, determined to bring the internal-combustion vehicle to an end and wants to let gay marriage proceed without government interference. And because this is a film, rather than Red State America, these policies make him all the more electable, rather than lynchable.

They also capture the imagination of political whizz-kid Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling). Myers is quick-thinking, savvy and a favourite of his boss Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an old hand at strategising. But he’s also being sized up by the more ruthless Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), who spins for Morris’s rival, a right-wing Bible thumper.

“Beware the Ides of March,” the soothsayer tells Julius Caesar, but Clooney isn’t so much putting out a warning as adding to the pile of evidence that moral substance is becoming a rare commodity – a point he also made in Good Night, And Good Luck. He also strikes a zeitgeisty note in this current economic climate by showing the point at which good, or at least fairly well intentioned, people sell their souls in order to hang on to their job.

As a director, Clooney has become more confident and imaginative over the course of his four films - but he still finds it hard to trust his audience enough to take his foot off the “loud” pedal when making a dramatic or thematic point. Whenever dark deeds are being contemplated, it seems an Ides character naturally gravitates towards dark-wooded interiors or half-lit locations. I don’t know much about politics, but I think it’s fair to assume that sometimes awful things happen under the fluorescent lights of an Ikea-furnished office too.

The film’s script could also do with a few more twists, rather than just the one, but if this is a potboiler rather than a penetrating Sorkin-smart drama, at least Clooney manages to work up a head of steam and a sense of propulsion.

Clooney reserves the most eye-catching, atypical role for himself, but since it’s his ball, I guess that he gets to call dibs, and he’s unnervingly accomplished when asked to combine treachery and plausibility in the sequence where he has to reassure his wife (Jennifer Ehle) that a sex scandal involving an intern (Evan Rachel Wood) has nothing to do with him. Clooney may have ruled out any possibility of heading into the political arena in real life, but onscreen he has the emollient persuasiveness of a practised politician, or a movie star.

THE IDES OF MARCH (15)

Director: George Clooney

Running time: 102 minutes

RATING: ***

On general release from Friday.