The Ides of March: All primary colours; no shades to be found

Based on Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which was loosely based on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign of Howard Dean, The Ides of March concerns a young press secretary’s education in the sort of compromise, corruption and throat-cutting that the weary sages tell us is essential to getting ahead in politics. But Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) has it both ways—he’s simultaneously idealistic and shrewd—so when push comes to shove his fangs push their way out of his baby gums and he proves to be the all-too apt pupil of his immediate superior (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the opposition’s poacher (Paul Giamatti), the manipulative journalist (Marisa Tomei) he thought was his pal and, of course, the charismatic candidate he works for, Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (director and co-scripter George Clooney), who mostly stays in the film’s margins until its final act, until then entering the foreground only for a highly conspicuous, strategically placed scene of intimacy between he and his true-blue wife.

Much of the pleasure to be had in The Ides of March emerges from the initial buzz of the promise of victory emanating from Morris’ camp, of which Meyers is the behind-the-scenes star. A couple of beautifully realized scenes find Meyers flirting with a smart, lovely intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood). Clooney has assembled a magnificent cast and, with the help of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, he crafts some superb flights of ping-pong dialogue in carefully composed close-ups. For much of the first half, there’s a slightly exposition-heavy quality to the dialogue that feels weirdly stagey yet gradually makes sense as you start to glean just how much of what we’re hearing and seeing is illusory or fundamentally full of shit. And herein lies the film’s weakness: it is precisely as cynical as you’d expect a movie about US politics from Clooney and his regular producer/collaborator Grant Heslov to be, while lacking in any specific or especially poignant revelations. Everything is tweaked to play neatly into the narrative schema, including an unexpected death that constitutes the limpest sort of plot twist (the reason it’s unexpected is because there’s no good reason to expect it). Clooney is a fine directorial talent, but the material—occasionally clever but never wise—is finally more shallow than it clearly wants to be. Still, worth checking out if you’re curious.

A few good mentalists: Men Who Stare at Goats

US Journalist Bill Wilton’s wife leaves him for an older guy with a robot arm. Wanting to prove himself during a spell of self-doubt he gets his employers to send him to Iraq, where he hangs out in a hotel and sees no action—until he meets fellow American Lyn Cassady, enigmatic, handsome yet lacking style, charismatic yet over-sensitive. And psychic, it would seem. Cassady’s the one-time star member of an elite, non-lethal, mentalist military unit formed in the 1980s. He claims to be in Iraq on special assignment, and Wilton tags along. That we get to colourful Cassady by way of the shambling, moping, ordinary Wilton seems a perfectly good starting point for the movie. The problem is that Wilton’s apparently convinced the filmmakers that the movie is actually primarily about him.

Wilton’s a stand-in for Jon Ronson, whose 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats provides the source material, adapted for the screen by Peter Straughan. As an exposé of the secret history of bizarre American paranormal defense research and its connection to interrogation techniques currently used in the War on Terror, placing Ronson at the front of the book’s narrative makes sense. As a movie however, one based on ostensible facts but staged as fiction, the focus on Wilton feels like a major dramaturgical miscalculation, and not only because of the almost palpably uncertain lead performance from Ewan McGregor.

The directorial debut of Grant Heslov, who co-scripted Good Night and Good Luck, The Men Who Stare at Goats frustrates because it’s sitting on a mountain of comic gold it rarely bothers to fully burrow into. George Clooney was in two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival this year and he was the best thing in both of them. He valiantly embodies Cassady as a boyish man of bruised affectations, wearing a moustache for extra confidence—everybody in this movie wears moustaches for extra confidence—his social skills and general maturity stunted after devoting his adult life to advancing himself in an discipline almost no one can believe, much less appreciate. Clooney’s conviction as he practices “remote viewing” by meditating to Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ is a thing of beauty. Jeff Bridges plays Cassady’s mentor Bill Django, a Vietnam vet and New Age Lebowski whose once grandiose iconoclasm has slowly dissipated through petty rivalries, the gradual loss of confidence on the part of the military upper echelon, and middle-age drug burn-out. Kevin Spacey plays Larry Hooper, another psychic warrior so irked by Cassady’s superior talents back in the day that he successfully conspired to oust his competition and command the “First Earth Battalion” himself. It’s ideal Spacey material, Hooper’s childish condescension the perfect foil for Cassady’s oddly touching earnestness and Django’s shaggy, mellow optimism.

When turned loose, the Clooney/Bridges/Spacey trio effortlessly produce brilliantly silly entertainment, but they’re inexplicably upstaged by the Wilton A-story and by Straughan/Heslov’s decision to take material rich in historical resonance—the experimental goats being Iraqi surrogates—and turn it into a humdrum variation on Mystery Men, an utterly inconsequential, middle-of-the-road, lightly eccentric, feel-good comedy about guys who can’t seem to grow up, replete with limpid score and dumb fantasy ending. Not a bad time by any stretch, but a notable waste all the same.