The Sauced Bulletin

Politics!  Intrigue!  Lying and cheating!  Shit goes down in the new political thriller The Ides of March, sexily directed by George Clooney.  I was not surprised to learn, during the end credits, that this movie is based on a play.  Because that’s exactly what it feels like!  Not in a bad way, but just in the way that the whole movie is essentially just really good actors talking to each other.  What more could you want!?

Gosling plays the young hotshot campaign manager caught in a web of deception while trying to get George Clooney elected president.  Clooney humbly steps aside for much of the story, allowing all the heavy lifting (aside from one awesome scene in a restaurant kitchen) to Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood.  And they all do a fantastic job.  Seriously, the ensemble work in this film is phenomenal, and Clooney doesn’t waste a minute of screen time.  Every second is fraught with tension and it is hard to guess where things are going next.

And yet even among all those great actors, Ryan motherfucking Gosling steals the show.  How does he do it!?  I guess he’s just charming as all hell, because you want him on screen literally every second.  Someone recently said to me that Ryan Gosling is having a Leonardo DiCaprio kind of career and that is exactly right.  The Notebook is like Leo’s Titanic:  an overrated chick movie that makes all dudes immediately dislike him, as both an actor and a person.  But after Titanic, Leo was all “Fuck this heart-throb shit, I’m a REAL actor!” and he started making good movies.  And now look, we love him!  The Departed!  Inception!  Go Leo!  Ryan Gosling seems to have made a similar decision, and last year he was in Blue Valentine, one of the grittiest, most difficult to watch portrayals of a doomed romance this side of A Woman Under the Influence.  Then this year he was in Drive, Crazy Stupid Love, and now this!  He can be a badass psycho, he can be funny, he can be slick and charming, dude does it all.  Don’t get me wrong, everyone is great in this movie (I mean Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti?  Come on.  You had me at the trailer).  But it’s Ryan Gosling’s show from the very beginning.  Clooney can’t even compete.

Speaking of George Clooney, the man is showing himself to be a pretty good director.  Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was weird but likeable (thanks to Charlie Kauffman’s script) and Good Night, and Good Luck was fucking fantastic.  The Ides of March demonstrates a fairly keen sense of pacing and suspense when it comes to storytelling, as well as a good eye for the look of a slick political thriller.  I don’t know if Clooney is banking on a late-career Clint Eastwood-style move to full-on directing, but he could definitely do it.

Anyway, you should go see The Ides of March because it’s tense, suspenseful, clever, and extremely well acted.  It’s not the best movie of the year by any means, but it’s a solid piece of filmmaking that is perfectly timed given the ramping up of the 2012 presidential race.  Do some of Gov. Morris’s promises/platitudes sound like what Barack Obama said in 2008?  You bet your ass they do.  But the film isn’t an indictment of any one political figure, but rather politics as a career for both the candidates and the people who make them what they are.  It’s a dangerous road to travel, and this movie shows that only the ruthless survive.