Dream factory

The film boasts a fine cast, including man of the moment Ryan Gosling, Evan Rachel Wood, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, and Clooney himself. The problem, however, is that The Ides of March is so deadly serious, and so seriously downbeat, that it immediately made me worry what was to come later in the festival.

Set during the last lap of a presidential primary in Ohio, Clooney’s fourth film as director (he also had a hand in the writing) presents an utterly jaded and cynical insider tale of political power games, personal ambition, loyalty, betrayal, sex and spin, that feels at once timeless and contemporary. If you, like Tomei’s journalist, believe that all politicians are destined to disappoint, then you won’t be disappointed.

It is certainly what Gosling’s idealistic press spokesman discovers, as the Obama-like governor he puts his hope in for a better, brighter future for America turns out not to be quite the man he thought he was.

The film touches on the issue of private and public morality, and whether we should expect our politicians always to practise in private what they preach in public. Is there an argument for putting the greater good first when a politician slips up? Is it possible, in these times of round-the-clock news and the internet, to keep a sense of perspective about such matters? And would the fall-out from the Clinton-Lewinsky affair have been different if Americans were more relaxed about their leaders’ sexual peccadilloes?

These thoughts came to mind as all around Clooney’s apparently decent governor, people vie for a little piece of power, sit in judgement, or, in Gosling’s case, shift from idealism to pragmatism.

Taut, intelligently written and grippingly acted, The Ides of March may not have been the most cheerful film to open the festival with, but it provided a satisfying curtain-raiser.

The question hanging over Madonna’s W.E. was whether the pop chameleon had managed to reinvent herself as a credible film-maker. For some, the question was clearly moot, and I could practically hear the sound of pens being filled with acid and knives being sharpened. Unsurprisingly, there were critics who instantly pronounced W.E. an unmitigated disaster. But while it never really coheres as a fully realised piece of work stylistically, W.E. is nevertheless an enjoyably eccentric romantic hotchpotch which is never boring, sometimes moving, both charming and unintentionally funny in its moments of naïvety, and always visually appealing.

Traversing past and present, the film switches – or maybe thrashes – back and forth between the burgeoning romance between unhappily married Wally Winthrop (Australian rising star Abbie Cornish) and a Russian security guard at Sotheby’s in New York, and the history-making love affair between Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), with whom Wally is obsessed, and King Edward VIII (James d’Arcy).

Wally has fallen for the fairytale and seeks solace and guidance in Simpson’s story. Madonna, though, goes some way to deconstructing the myth – and, arguably, the myth of celebrity – to reveal the truth of Simpson’s life: that far from being happily loved-up and living the dream, she felt isolated, trapped, and rejected by society.

But the film never achieves a consistent tone, with Madonna throwing in everything from Simpson dancing wildly at a riotous party fuelled by benzedrine and champagne played out to the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant, to a moving reconstruction of Edward VIII’s abdication speech, and a piece of silliness involving pugs.

While W.E. won’t convince anyone that Madonna should give up her day job, it is by no means the thoroughgoing embarrassment that some have claimed. Forget the name at the helm and enjoy the oddness.

If Michael Fassbender’s roles in X-Men: First Class and Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Jane Eyre suggested he’d stopped taking risks, then Shame, his second film to screen at the Venice Film Festival, provides shocking evidence to the contrary.

A jolt to the system when seen at a 9am screening on Sunday, the film reunites the German-Irish actor with the British artist Steve McQueen, whose 2008 film Hunger put the actor on audiences’ radar, and stunningly launched the artist as a feature director.

It was Fassbender’s body that was wasting away as Bobby Sands in Hunger, but it is arguably his character’s soul that is atrophying as Brandon, an office worker in Manhattan, whose fastidious outward appearance masks a messy inner life.

Brandon has an insatiable sexual appetite that prostitutes, one-night stands, pornography, and frequent masturbation cannot sate. Yet he seems to have his life in order – at least until his troubled sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), arrives in his apartment unannounced, sending him into a tailspin. Their closeness and physical familiarity, and the way that the nature of their bond is initially withheld, suggest that theirs could once have been more than just a straightforward brother-sister relationship, but McQueen is too subtle a director to spell everything out.

Fassbender and Mulligan dazzle as siblings struggling with their demons in different ways, while the former’s descent into a kind of fleshly hell is both shocking and disturbing. Meanwhile, McQueen fulfils the promise of his first feature, and further cements his reputation as probably the UK’s most daring director of the moment.

David Cronenberg is regarded as the king of “body horror”, but it would be a mistake to think that the focus of his films was always purely corporeal. His latest film, A Dangerous Method, he goes straight for the brain.

Working from Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, Cronenberg charts the changing relationship between up-and-coming psychoanalyst Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and masochistic Russian Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) – who goes from patient to lover to child psychologist – in what the director calls an “intellectual menage à trois with sexual overtones”.

With its themes of sexual repression and liberation, and the dangers and pleasures of letting go, the film echoes Cronenberg’s work as far back as 1975’s Shivers. A Dangerous Method doesn’t, however, indulge in bodily fluids (apart from a lingering close-up of post-coital blood after Spielrein loses her virginity). Betraying its stage origins, this is a film very much rooted in dialogue.

Visually, it is lush and handsomely mounted, while Knightley surprises by throwing caution to the wind as the hysterical beauty whose beatings by her father as a child have left her with a penchant for being spanked. Fassbender notches up another intriguing performance as a man whose moral compass and optimism shift as he gives in to his urges, while Mortenson brings gravitas and wisdom to Freud.

Part of the fun of 1970s disaster movies like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno was wondering which members of their starry casts would make it to the final reel. Now Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion allows you play “spot the victim”, as the likes of Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Marion Cottilard find themselves caught up in a deadly viral pandemic.

Working with a multi-threaded plot that cuts between ordinary people’s efforts to survive and scientists’ attempts to create a vaccine, Soderbergh builds a convincingly realistic picture of the chaos, fear, and death that might happen in such an event.

But while the film effectively makes one palpably aware of the ease with which a contagion could be spread, and the huge number of lives that could be at stake, it fails to really grip or be emotionally involving. Nor is it a Threads for the Sars generation.

At least Soderbergh is as unconcerned – up to a point – about his actors’ star status as a virus would be, so you might be surprised to see who ends up on an autopsy table.

Monday night, meanwhile, saw the premiere of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The tortoise to Bond and Bourne’s hares, this classy adaptation of John Le Carré’s Cold War spy novel moves at an unfashionably slow pace, but gets you much further in the long run.

Directed with an obsessive eye for period detail and a strong command of atmosphere by Thomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), the film follows the attempt by recently dismissed career spy George Smiley (Gary Oldman) to smoke out a mole in MI6.

The film does a wonderful job of illustrating the loneliness, paranoia, personal sacrifice and isolation that come with being a part of the spying game, in which a breach of trust can mean the difference between life and death.

It is beautifully crafted, with a fine cast including old hands such as Oldman and John Hurt, exciting rising stars including Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, and the ubiquitous Mark Strong. However, whether it will appeal to a generation raised on a type of film-making where speed is often of the essence, remains to be seen.

Roman Polanski was absent from Venice but his new film, Carnage, was been one of the most entertaining movies of the festival.

Adapted from Yasmina Reza’s play, the film puts two couples who hate each other in a room, and watches as they rip each other to shreds. For a moment, it seems that Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) have come to an amicable agreement with Penny (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C Reilly) after a violent altercation between their young sons in a park.

It doesn’t take long, though, for their bourgeois manners to desert them, their masks to slip, and their true feelings – and mutual loathing – to burst out to hilarious and draw-dropping effect. Before long, a treasured book has been covered in vomit, and a bunch of tulips indecorously thrashed to pieces.

Polanksi expertly choreographs his actors in the film’s apartment setting, while they throw themselves into their roles as if their lives depended on it. Thanks to everyone operating at the top of their game, this small gem is not to be missed.

l The Venice Film Festival continues until 10 September.