The Ides of March: adapted by George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon from Willimon's play Farragut North; directed by George Clooney; starring Ryan Gosling (Stephen Meyers), George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara), Paul Giamatti (Tom Duffy), Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns), Marisa Tomei (Ida Horowicz), and Jeffrey Wright (Senator Thompson) (2011): I figure George Clooney can just pick up a telephone, call five randomly chosen actors, and sign them to whatever project he's working on by the end of the day. Certainly The Ides of March has an All-Star cast. They've all got something to work with, too, in this smart political thriller.
To a Canadian born and raised in a parliamentary democracy, the Byzantine U.S. federal system will always possess a certain alien charm -- and, frankly, a simmering alien horror. The Ides of March lays out the joys and horrors of this overly moneyed, often paradoxical system of democracy without ever seeming preachy or too laden with politicobabble.
Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, 30-year-old second-in-command of Governor Mike Morris's campaign to win the Democratic primaries. We follow the campaign during a tumultuous week in Ohio, as deals and double-deals and betrayals and potentially career-ending events swirl in and around the campaign. The dialogue is mostly sharp, the performances lived-in and solid. No one here plays a dummy. And the actors are all up to playing smart.
Gosling shines in playing someone who's both savvy and idealistic. Honouring the audience's intelligence, the final scene leaves it to the viewer to decide how much that idealism has been shattered by the events of the film. It's a quiet, subtle, Oscar-quality performance.
Indeed, there isn't a weak performance in the movie. Clooney is utterly believeable as a charismatic candidate promising hope and change; Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti make for crafty and rumpled long-time backroom opponents; even Evan Rachel Wood nails her role as a pretty, connected intern who gets caught up in the undertow of dangerous political depths. Highly recommended.
Source Code; written by Ben Ripley; directed by Duncan Jones; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Colter), Michelle Monaghan (Christina), Vera Farmiga (Goodwin), and Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Rutledge) (2011): Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie, whose birth name was David Jones) directed the excellent science-fiction character study Moon, starring Sam Rockwell. Here, he gives us a science-fiction thriller based mostly on the revelation of character under pressure.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays an American soldier whose mind can be dropped into someone else's mind for the purposes of finding out the details of an imminent terrorist threat. A commuter train has already been destroyed as a prelude to some greater catastrophe, and it's into the last eight minutes of that commuter train's existence that Gyllenhaal will be repeatedly plunged, replacing the mind of a schoolteacher killed in the blast.
Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley wisely keep the explanation of how this process works to a minimum because either the explanation will make no sense, or it would take ten minutes of Basil Exposition to explain it. They even make the lack of explanation a minor plot point -- Gyllenhaal's character gets thwarted repeatedly by the scientist in charge of the project, who basically touches on a couple of points (parabolic calculus! quantum mechanics!) in a way that seems almost a parody of the Architect's ramblings in The Matrix Reloaded.
In any case, Gyllenhaal can be repeatedly sent into "the Source Code", the project's term for a weird mesh of time travel and mind-swapping. We're told repeatedly that the past can't actually be altered and that only information can be gathered to help the present. But is this true? And why can't Gyllenhaal's character remember how he came to join the project?
The obvious genre antecedents for Source Code are Groundhog Day and the Star Trek: TNG episode "Cause and Effect", with a little 12 Monkeys thrown in. Jones keeps the movie moving at a brisk clip, with the reiterations changing enough each time so that the movie becomes neither repetitive nor boring. Gyllenhaal is solid as the baffled soldier, Michelle is perky as a train passenger/love interest, and Jeffrey Wright and Vera Farmiga do nice work as the scientist and Captain running the project (dubbed 'Beleaguered Castle', a solitaire reference that plays out in the movie and also seems to allude to the importance of cards to the classic brainwashing thriller The Manchurian Candidate). Highly recommended.
