MOVIE REVIEW: Clooney tells, but doesn't show on screen

Political maneuvering is a fine topic for a film — unless we’ve seen the moves before. George Clooney’s “The Ides of March” features the same underhanded tactics and false idols. It’s a film that looks important. After all, we’re a year away from a presidential election, and the cast is mighty impressive. But since “The Ides of March” insists on deeming the routine as extraordinary, it’s hard to care.

Gov. Mike Morris (Clooney), a war hero and Democratic presidential hopeful, needs to win the Ohio primary to essentially land the nomination. Helping Morris is crafty veteran campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and young press secretary Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a charming hotshot whose star is rising.

Myers is so popular that the campaign manager for Morris’s rival (Paul Giamatti) courts the youngster, promising him that Morris won’t win Ohio. On a roll, Myers starts sleeping with his subordinate Molly, an attractive, young intern whose father is the head of the Democratic National Committee. Since the intern is played by Evan Rachel Wood, who perpetually looks like she’s about to star in a remake of “Double Indemnity,” it’s a given that her presence spells doom. It turns out that Molly knows Morris a little too well, an arrangement that could sink the campaign. That’s not the only problem. Morris refuses to satisfy the demands of a senator (Jeffrey Wright) who could guarantee him the primary. A newspaper reporter (Marisa Tomei) learns of Myers’s clandestine meeting with the opposition, a juicy scoop that suddenly jeopardizes his future.

This great unraveling never resonates because Clooney (who also served as a producer and as a screenwriter) commits the cardinal sin of filmmaking: He tells, but never shows. Every revelation in “The Ides of March” involves tense conversations in dark, lonely places, which amounts to stock footage for political dramas. As Myers scrambles to save the campaign, and his livelihood, there’s no sense of him discovering larger truths. Maybe if these didn’t involve shifty motives and lying — problems most of us encounter on a daily basis — the movie wouldn’t feel so gullible. Is Clooney, who I don’t think is in eighth grade civics, just discovering that politics is a dirty business?

A cast featuring three Academy Award winners is stuck playing caricatures. Tomei, Hoffman and Giamatti play frumpy political lifers. Clooney is the good-looking, middle-aged, easily manipulated beacon of hope. Gosling, however, doesn’t even have a model to follow. Clooney and his writers have Myers cagey one minute, naive the next. It’s a classic example of screenwriters bending a character to fit the story’s whims. Before he became a ubiquitous multiplex presence, Gosling earned his reputation by playing morally imperfect characters. That Clooney reduces Myers’ emotional crisis to youthful hubris and shock is an insult to Gosling’s talent — and the audience’s intelligence.

In Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” (2005) Edward R. Murrow’s stand off with Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy felt timely and urgent. Clooney urged us to take a long look at our present by examining the past. With “The Ides of March,” moviegoers are left looking for a satisfying contemporary conflict — when they’re not staring helplessly at their watches.

Rating: W W