The Ides of March: All primary colours; no shades to be found

Based on Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which was loosely based on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign of Howard Dean, The Ides of March concerns a young press secretary’s education in the sort of compromise, corruption and throat-cutting that the weary sages tell us is essential to getting ahead in politics. But Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) has it both ways—he’s simultaneously idealistic and shrewd—so when push comes to shove his fangs push their way out of his baby gums and he proves to be the all-too apt pupil of his immediate superior (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the opposition’s poacher (Paul Giamatti), the manipulative journalist (Marisa Tomei) he thought was his pal and, of course, the charismatic candidate he works for, Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (director and co-scripter George Clooney), who mostly stays in the film’s margins until its final act, until then entering the foreground only for a highly conspicuous, strategically placed scene of intimacy between he and his true-blue wife.

Much of the pleasure to be had in The Ides of March emerges from the initial buzz of the promise of victory emanating from Morris’ camp, of which Meyers is the behind-the-scenes star. A couple of beautifully realized scenes find Meyers flirting with a smart, lovely intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood). Clooney has assembled a magnificent cast and, with the help of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, he crafts some superb flights of ping-pong dialogue in carefully composed close-ups. For much of the first half, there’s a slightly exposition-heavy quality to the dialogue that feels weirdly stagey yet gradually makes sense as you start to glean just how much of what we’re hearing and seeing is illusory or fundamentally full of shit. And herein lies the film’s weakness: it is precisely as cynical as you’d expect a movie about US politics from Clooney and his regular producer/collaborator Grant Heslov to be, while lacking in any specific or especially poignant revelations. Everything is tweaked to play neatly into the narrative schema, including an unexpected death that constitutes the limpest sort of plot twist (the reason it’s unexpected is because there’s no good reason to expect it). Clooney is a fine directorial talent, but the material—occasionally clever but never wise—is finally more shallow than it clearly wants to be. Still, worth checking out if you’re curious.

Detrimental education: Whatever Works

Its title alone, the verbal equivalent of a shrug, evokes creative lethargy, and indeed the script was dug out of a desk drawer caked in 30 years of dust. But no one ever accused Woody Allen of trying to be up-to-date—not even Woody Allen. So if the stray signs of contemporary life spied in the margins of the Manhattan Chinatown locations are just about the only things that keep Whatever Works from feeling like 1979, well, the comic sensibility driving the film is of a considerably elder vintage anyway. And if we like Woody, we’re hardly bothered by his tending to the flame of old-old school humour accompanied by a soundtrack of even older records. “They really don’t write them like they used to,” says our protagonist Boris Yellnikoff. Though he has exclusive knowledge of his being watched by an audience and repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, Boris seems somehow oblivious to the fact the movie he lives inside of is being written very much like they used to.

So another old curmudgeon strikes up an unlikely but not inconceivable romance with a nubile innocent, the pair enacting a variation on Pygmalion in which the professor provides lessons not so much in sophistication as cynicism. Boris is a windbag, a stupendously voluble misanthrope, the self-described intellectual superior of the vast majority of the human race, a fact he’s able to confirm regularly by teaching chess to talentless children who, naturally, he chastises mercilessly. At one point, he suggests that all parents should send their kids to concentration camp. He’s a total prick and makes no bones about it. But he has his vulnerable side: he’s deeply paranoid and superstitious, a failed suicide attempt has left him with a permanent limp, and he has regular middle-of-the-night panic attacks. He's also one of the worst-dressed people in a movie full of people who dress really, really bad.

He’s also got some sort of a soft spot, however small, one massaged by Melodie St. Ann Celestine, an absurdly cheerful Southern elf who Boris grudgingly takes into his home. She talks like an endearing idiot, though we assume must have sort of edge to her given that she had the gumption to leave a stable home and starve it out in the Big Apple all alone with nothing more than the near-uniformly pink clothes on her back. And we know she must possess some sense of discretion when she comes home disappointed after hearing a concert by some band called Anal Sphincter. We might suspect Boris of lecherous intentions but he makes it perfectly clear that he’s uninterested in sex. How these two manage to connect seems to have more to do with desperation and sublime timing.

The casting of Larry David as Boris seems inspired, the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm being a garrulous ranter of singular ability. It’s no stretch whatsoever to imagine David in the role of resident Allen stand-in. But maybe that’s the problem. Had David been forced to stretch a little more he may have been better able to play stakes convincingly, thus making the comedy more urgent and, we hope, funnier. (A few choice moments really fly, but more of them fall flat.) And he may have been able to convey more of a sense of Boris’ inner life, the house of all those kooky contradictions that Allen loves to play with. Boris finally seems like he should really have just been played by Allen, who, no matter how droopy the material, can virtually always make us believe that he’s truly falling in love. Or at the very least, lust.

Rounding out the cast, Even Rachel Wood does a pretty remarkable job of giving Melodie some sort of journey of self-discovery, and if the guy she inevitably leaves Boris for is complete tool—he’s a handsome actor who lives on a houseboat and plays the flute for Christ’s sake—well, perhaps there’s some truth to that sort of match. Patricia Clarkson plays Melodie’s mom and Ed Begley Jr. plays her dad, and they too manage to breathe a little life into their corny types, ie: Jesus-lovin’ Southern conservatives that only need a sojourn in funky ol’ New York with frank atheists like Boris to realize how much richer life can actually be when you redefine yourselves as pseudo-cultured bohemians. But regardless of the cast’s efforts, the unmistakable thinness of these characters, each of them essentially background players in a one-man show, combined with the limits of the story’s dynamics, dependent as it is on cliché plot twists, renders Whatever Works into passable Woody, but hardly must-see. At least it makes an effort to be genuinely optimistic in the end, which is surely not the easiest thing for Woody Allen and, for that alone, I confess I left the theatre with my cockles a little warmer than when I entered.

The Dying Animal

The final moments of The Wrestler find Mickey Rourke’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson lifting himself off the canvas, crawling to the corner post, climbing wearily atop his makeshift altar, and, to the adoring clamour of his fans, jumping off the top rope into nowhere. That Randy never lands, that the moment we’re left with is one of empty space and suspended breath, speaks to Darren Aronofsky’s shrewdness, his understanding of what this movie’s really about. The basic narrative structure of Robert D. Siegel’s script is rather formulaic, the Sundance-friendly down-and-out redemption tale, if you will, with a number of threadbare contrivances, particularly when dealing with Randy’s attempted reconciliation with his estranged daughter Stephanie, who’s played at too consistently high an emotional pitch by Evan Rachel Wood.

Aronofsky seems aware of the story’s limitations and places his emphasis elsewhere. Coming after the director’s almost oppressively spectacular Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain—a film famous for being booed at the very same festival where The Wrestler later took the top prize—the visual style adopted here seems shockingly low-key, as un-flashy as the wintry Jersey locales. The camerawork, by Maryse Alberti, is hand-held, almost purely observational, willing to doggedly follow its protagonist, a technique that, echoing the Dardenne brothers, leads to an unusual number of shots of the back of Rourke’s head in the opening scenes, as though Aranofsky wants to delay our looking this wounded old animal in the eyes. It’s a brilliant tactic, because this animal, as well as the milieu he moves in, is the true subject of our fascination and our empathy.

While The Wrestler overall feels admirably workmanlike, Rourke’s performance is by contrast a masterwork, though his collaborators deserve credit for helping to cultivate it. On one level the movie’s a sort of documentary, not only about the bizarre world of exhibition wrestling, from the congenial backstage orchestrations of flamboyant combat to the drug culture to enormously entertaining scenes of beefy guys shopping for shit to smack each other with in dollar stores, but about the ways in which our bodies betray us and our movie stars age. Randy the washed-up wrestler who was a star in the 80s is played by Rourke the washed-up actor who was a star, not to mention a pretty brilliant actor, in the 80s. How character and actor align here is transfixing, disarming, and at times affectingly grotesque.

It may sound incongruently highfalutin to speak of a movie as marginal as Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget in the same breath as The Wrestler, but the two films have something remarkable in common: each one allows us to closely view a man’s once beautiful body wearied if not positively ravaged by time and experience. Rourke’s face has been worked on in more ways than one. His frame is engorged strangely. His flesh has assumed the ruddy glow of an over-roasted turkey. Yet through this battered shell an old charisma achingly radiates, as does a desperation that’s almost palpable. I don’t mean in any way to slight Rourke’s performance or label it artless by drawing so much attention to mere presence. On the contrary, everything Rourke brings to the film is in the service of building a complex, highly specific character and telling this particular story.

Likewise, Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy, the stripper and single mother with whom Randy attempts to forge a relationship once he realizes that health issues are conspiring to end his career—and, most unnervingly, that he’s utterly alone in the world—is at once vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and sharply defined. In a sense Tomei’s efforts are even more laudable since her character is underdeveloped, a deficiency Aronofsky tries in vain to remedy with a prolonged, purposeless scene of her performing at the club. Tomei’s best moments are the ones devoted toward deepening our sense of Randy’s plight, like the scene in which Randy and Cassidy go to a bar in the afternoon and proudly declare their nostalgia for the hair metal days of their youth. Tomei fearlessly embraces the silliness of this shy bit of courtship, and Rourke, doing a little dance to the canned Ratt in his plaid shirt and duct-taped puffy coat, hair extensions swinging, is absurdly endearing.

But there’s another scene these two share that pretty much announces the most troubling theme of The Wrestler in a manner that’s in perfect sympathy with the characters’ relative lack of sophistication. Cassidy raves to Randy about The Passion of the Christ, about the unholy battery of abuse heaped upon Mel Gibson’s gladiatorial incarnation of Jesus, and Randy, though he hasn’t seen the movie, takes its appeal as a matter of course. Both Cassidy and Randy have devoted their professional lives to the exhibition and exploitation of their flesh, and theirs is a masochistic glory that delivers rewards in diminishing returns.

In the movie’s single funniest, most appalling moment, an ecstatic fan, some kid with no legs, begs Randy to beat his opponent with his artificial limb. Randy shrugs and dutifully complies. It’s proposed then that each of us craves this contact with punishment. Each of us wants to participate in the grinding down of our bodies made into theatre. And this might also explain why so many people who might not normally pay tickets for a wrestling match will part with their cash to see The Wrestler and, in some way that can’t quite be put into words, walk away satisfied, and feeling a little more alive.