The Ides of March (2011)

George Clooney's adaptation of Beau Willimon's play arrives with the polished surface of a film that knows exactly what it is doing. Ryan Gosling's idealistic press man descends through a primary campaign in Ohio, shedding his principles one compromised phone call at a time. The craft is undeniable. The camera watches, the dialogue snaps, and the moral rot spreads with the patience of a chess game. It is a movie about operatives, not ideas, and it wears its cynicism like a tailored suit.

The progressive sensibilities on display are of the 2011 prestige variety, which is to say modest and mostly incidental. Marisa Tomei's reporter and Evan Rachel Wood's intern are afforded real screen time, and the abortion subplot is handled without cheap moralizing, but Molly exists chiefly as a lever the men pull against each other. Jeffrey Wright sits at the table as the lone significant minority figure, a senator whose value is measured in pledged delegates. Nobody remarks on any of it. Race is not a subject here, nor is class, nor the environment, nor the body, nor the mind. The film's interests run narrower and colder.

Clooney gives himself the best speeches, all that talk of dignity and integrity, and then lets his own behavior hollow them out. The point is hypocrisy, not instruction, and the audience is trusted to notice without being told. The target is the operative class, the men who trade favors and call it strategy. Capital itself escapes scrutiny. What remains is a handsome, well-acted machine for producing despair, and it does that job with grim efficiency.