The Ides of March
As my 2011 ranking indicates, I actually saw this film last year. “The Ides of March” is one of those films which I wanted to see because people were talking about it, very differently from “Dick” which I saw based on, well, gut feeling. I haven’t seen all that many George Clooney films, and I was curious about his first directional attempt. After all, this is the guy who is soon going to make a movie based on a script by the Coen brothers.
Somehow my feeling that random choices can be better than watching well-known films did not let me down. I liked “The Ides of March” but while I thought it was quite interesting and rather enjoyable, I can’t say that I feel like I learned anything from it, or that I gained all that much in life by having seen the film. Compared to “Dick” which is a film I still think about, “The Ides of March” is a more or less interesting story wrapped in pretty gift paper.
I do think that George Clooney did a good job. There are some details I like, for example how the main character does the same thing at the beginning and at the end of the film, but his voice and his expression have changed, an evidence to how he gradually has stepped into the darkness of politics during the film. I also thought that pacing and dramaturgy were pretty well-handled, and I am pretty much a fan of everybody in the film. I think that George Clooney is good, Ryan Gosling is brilliant, I love love love Philip Seymour Hoffmann and I got a great impression of Marisa Tomei ever since “The Wrestler”. The star in my heart is Rachel Evan Wood, who got a rather bland role here and did the best you could with it. Unfortunately, this stellar cast cannot hide the fact that the film itself fails to contribute, somehow.
Maybe my expectations were just too high, maybe I just want films dabbling in the realms of politics to be more dramatic or more realistic or more sophisticated. It’s not like “The Ides of March” is a bad film, it’s just not a particularly good film and it leaves me wondering why all these great people could not have spent their time working on something greater. So I am looking forward to what George Clooney is going to do next.