What's left after making a million a year on K Street and having the American dream be your oyster through contacts, know how and numbers? You start to go for the big leagues. You begin to prop up the demagogues and live off the service charges you get for making them successful. This is the sort of sport where pudgy, grey-headed analysts know how to work the ball and lean, energetic 30 year olds have to catch up. This is also the game where positions are held for decades, and you either circulate in the substratum of patricians or you gamble for the highest office a citizen can hold.
The man with ambitions is Gov. Mike Morris of Pennsylvania (George Clooney); the state of Ohio is the only thing in the way of him becoming the Democratic Presidential Nominee. The old heads of the game, meandering about with their well-earned girths, are Senior Campaign Managers Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who works for Morris, and Tom Duffy ( Paul Giamatti), who works for the opposition. In the middle of their calculations and the sort of familiarity that comes from enemies that just won't go away is Junior Campaign Manager Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling). Meyers is no fool; he knows how to work the system and is regarded as highly capable. However, his reasons for supporting Morris are more earnest than practical. He actually believes in his candidate's power to change the world and regards Zara as an unconditional friend. With all of the optimism in the world, a steady career in his sights and a reliable supply of sex from the DNC chairman's daughter, Meyers walks right into a trap that complicates the rest of the film and endangers everyone.
Shaved to bring out the innocence in his long, oval face and looking even more up-right and thin in a perfectly fitting white dress shirt and tie, Gosling is believable as the youngest man in the room. He looks like he still spends as much time at the basketball court as behind a table. He also looks like the type of guy who'd believe he could meet with the other team and have no immediate issues. He's 30 years old, but life has been good enough that he can't foresee everything going wrong. But everything does go haywire; pregnancies are revealed, people die, jobs are lost and the truth is just too precious a commodity to be let out. It scares Meyers before he learns how to work the game and comes out on top.
In many ways this is the charm of "The Ides of March." It operates on a consistently small scale and deals with reversals that lead to the least of the protagonists becoming top dog. It's set up on a very Shakespearean formula and reinforces the idea by having its characters originate mostly in one class. These political understudies and big shots are also never clearly worse than one another. Everyone either takes advantage of or simply possesses a resource someone else doesn't. The fact that all of the protagonists are democrats adds irony to the competition and inequality. Quiet asides weave throughout the film where you can almost hear monologues recited in response to the latest catastrophe. Dialogues and summery executions are handled in drawn out beats that nearly forget they are on film.
However, the art of "The Ides of March" only really becomes cohesive near the end. Before the consequences of meeting with Duffy are fully revealed, the film seems to lag into an awkwardness that highlights the fact that not much worth mentioning has happened yet. The atmosphere of the Jazz club in particular is wasted. The close shots of the singer lend nothing to the setting that makes it feel more than a pit stop. The glass of whiskey is more a refreshment than something to ease the eyes and muscles after a long day. And perhaps that's the one great sin of this movie: it doesn't quite know how to handle its momentum.
Some minor flaws might revolve around some character traits being mentioned that don't really get a chance to develop. Duffy calls Meyers a great "media mind" and goes down the list of his charms and abilities. The audience, however, never gets to see Meyers do this more than once when he manipulates the podium to make Morris much taller than his opponent. We likewise get the idea that the intern, Molly, sleeps with Meyers not because he is the biggest wise guy in the room, but because she sees him as cute, promising and has genuine feelings for him. While this could be considered part of Duffy's ruse to draw him in, it's an idea we're fed almost subliminally through people's reactions to Meyers.
Beyond these inconsistencies, the characters are well plaid and three-dimensional. The setting, though often rushed through, is treated as it ought to be treated: like a flexible background where people simply act. It's a movie you should see if only for the art and tenderness that's put into its overwhelmingly better movements.
