So Ides of March

George Clooney directed that Movie himself didn't he ?

Shortly after taking office for his first term, Abraham Lincoln groused to a friend, “They have gambled me all around, bought and sold me a hundred times. I cannot begin to fulfill the pledges made in my name.” Lincoln’s delegates at the Chicago convention had, without the candidate’s knowledge, promised jobs to just about everybody they ran into in order to get the nomination for the Favorite Son. This kind of backroom dealing was already old news in 1860 and nothing much has changed up to the present day, as this film sets out to prove.

Clooney, himself, give us a marvelous supporting performance, and, as a director, he is willing, in a climactic confrontation, to light his own face in a harsh manner that makes him look ugly and sinister.

Ryan Gosling is one of the luckiest actors in movie history. A modestly talented personality, he should have had a movie career as the Best Friend and/or in a long-running cop/lawyer TV series. Instead, he came along at just the right time and got the right momentum to be dubbed the “next” Brando, De Niro, Norton, whatever. (Seriously, I’ve had the same doubts about Edward Norton.) Gosling’s is the main character in “The Ides of March,” a character that takes a definite and profound arc. But Gosling just can’t quite take it there. He is so colorless that he fades into the wallpaper whenever he shares the screen with the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomai, or, yes, George Clooney.