Movie Review: The Ides of March

Eric and I just watched The Ides of March, a new political drama with a whole bunch of actors we really like: George Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ryan Gosling.

Short plot summary: Stephen (Ryan Gosling) is an up and coming campaign media manager working alongside campaign manager Paul (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) in the presidential campaign of Governor Morris (George Clooney).  The race between Morris and Pullman is tight - think Obama/Clinton from 4 years ago. The polls in Ohio, the next primary, are too close to call. There is a key endorsement up for grabs.  Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) is the campaign manager for rival candidate Pullman.  When Duffy contacts Stephen about jumping ship and joining the Pullman campaign, basically all hell breaks loose. Stephen receives some information about the Pullman strategy that doesn't look good for his candidate. Will he remain loyal to Morris and Paul, even though he begins to doubt Morris's character? Will he flip to the surging campaign?

Thoughts: About 20 minutes into this, Eric said, "So, instead of watching real news people and political people go on and on and on about real presidential candidates, we're watching a movie with fake people doing basically the same thing?" With that, he took out his laptop and spent the rest of the movie surfing the internet. Since I'm a political junkie, I like the movie. I understood the message of the film. I liked it, but I didn't think it was the best movie I've ever seen.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention Ryan Gosling was there? In the "reading in bed the morning after sex" scene, he was wearing an undershirt. I think this was a subtle, or not so subtle, "this is a serious movie so Ryan Gosling's abs probably shouldn't be prominent" act. In Crazy Stupid Love or The Notebook, you can bet we wouldn't gotten some ab action!

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.  The movie was "pretty", the script was good, the music helped the tension, the acting was good. It missed really grabbing me and keeping me enthralled. Maybe a few peeks at the Gosling abs would have helped!