BEWARETHE IDES OF MARCH
The crucial Ohio presidential preferential primary has heated up for two candidates, presumably in 2004. Mike Morris (played by the film’s director, George Clooney) and Senator Pullman (played by Michael Mantell) are running neck and neck. While the candidates are making speeches, their campaign managers are trying to clinch the race by obtaining Ohio Governor Thompson’s (played by Jeffrey Wright) endorsement. Meanwhile, 20-year-old intern Molly Stearns (played by Evan Rachel Wood) makes a date with Morris’s deputy campaign manager, Stephen Myers (played by Ryan Gosling), something to excite date night filmviewing couples. While Morris’s campaign manager Paul Zara (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is out of town, Pullman’s campaign manager Tom Duffy (played by Paul Giamatti), calls Myers for a meeting to offer him a job. Myers refuses. After Myers reports the meeting to Zara, a crafty reporter (played by Marisa Tomei) releases a news story of the contact. But Duffy denies leaking the meeting to the press. Zara then fires Myers, explaining that in politics loyalty is valued above all else. Although Zara advises Myers to change careers, the latter protests that politics is his whole life. The Ides of March then ends as Myers figures out what to do, and a Shakespearian saga is played out. Based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, a writer who worked on Howard Dean’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in Iowa, filmviewers may learn a lesson or two about dirty politics, and Morris (Clooney) is able to orate a few leftist campaign sentences to appease Progressive Democrats. But no candidate would ever capitulate based on the bluff concocted as the turning point in the film. Another phony element is the film’s attempt to glamorize the aging bridge between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky, the very bridge that President Barack Obama portrayed only a week earlier than the film’s release as in serious need of repairs. Although the cynical story was written in response to the letdown of Dean’s bid for the presidency, the film’s production was delayed in the wake of the optimistic enthusiasm generated by Obama’s victory in 2008. A more profound Shakespearian account of perverse Macbethian political intrigue, reported within Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men (2011), awaits screenwriting or perhaps a documentary in case Obama is defeated in 2012. MH