All laptops and all cell phones must be confiscated, said security at the “Ides Of March” press screening. No exceptions. You’ll get your stuff back in a bag at the end of the show.
The movie opened exactly one day after this preview screening. Still, no electronics. No exceptions. You want to keep your cell and/or your laptop, go somewhere else.
The crowd went along. Grudgingly, but obligingly. And I didn’t raise much of a protest. I was an equal sheep, bleating equally.
And that proved apt. Because George Clooney’s new movie addresses the shades of sheepishness we find ourselves stuck with. And a smaller but crucial portion goes to our devices. How many people, young people especially, feel incomplete and isolated without them. I’m not so young. But I felt, if not incomplete, certainly nervous, about my communication devices sitting in a bag many feet from me.
“Ides Of March” started out as a stage play from co-screenwriter Beau Willimon. A few crucial sequences still unfold like set pieces on a stage. The plot twists on a few figures lying in a hotel bedroom. And of course, their electronics, doing only their electronic duty, rip away facades, exposing nasty visions.
Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, second in command to presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney). Gosling doesn’t take his shirt off in this one, and some ladies in the preview crowd groaned when they heard that news. But the new superstar fits neatly into the slot Clooney, as the film’s director, milled for him. Gosling’s bright eyes and suggestive smirk animate a character who isn’t quite as idealistic as he fancies himself.
Stephen Meyers imagines himself on a righteous cause. Surely his boss says all the right things (from a liberal standpoint), makes it easy for Meyers to believe in the work, the cause, the vision. Meyers is old enough to help. He isn’t mature enough to separate his idealism from his lust for the spotlight. He sublimates his own desires by working for the man actually in the spotlight.
Republicans will jape at what fools these Democrats be, although Paul Giamatti’s crack about the donkeys losing because they won’t get down into the mud with the elephants, might give those elephants a mud’s-eye-view pause. On a deeper level though, “Ides” casts a jaundiced eye at our process itself. “Ides Of March” doesn’t offer any solutions. This, it says finally, is how we are. If you want answers, alternatives, I suggest you try Westlake Center and City Hall. There, at least, people are trying for solutions. It beats choosing your own breed of sheep.[[In-content Ad]]