Movie Review: Ides of March beautifully done; Anonymous has its moments

Posted @ Jan. 07 2012 04:55PM by Susan - arts-ent

by Dr. Bob Blackwood

MPAA Ratings: "Anonymous" PG-13 • "Ides of March" R

George Clooney’s The Ides of March is the best political thriller I’ve seen since Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man (1964) with Henry Fonda. Clooney has directed three other films: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Leatherheads (2008). This film is better. (Photo left: George Clooney as Governor Mike Morris in Clooney’s Ides of March. Photo credit: Reiner Bajo/Columbia Pictures)

Set in a Democratic presidential primary in Ohio, the plot is direct, and the tempo is as taut as an over-tightened “E” string. Clooney plays the candidate, but Ryan Gosling is the star of this film, the 30-year-old media guru to the candidate’s experienced campaign manager, Philip Seymour Hoffman. These two formidable actors are playing against the other candidate’s campaign manager, the talented Paul Giamatti, and, at times, against each other.

Evan Rachel Wood, the intern, provides the sexual angle, though for my money the hard-bitten New York Times reporter played by Marisa Tomei, would be of greater interest—though far more dangerous. A ticket will show you who winds up on the top of the pile. The Ides of March shows that politics is the game of the winner—a game that has no rules, just advisory guidelines.

The smell of this campaign is the smell of the real thing. Clooney’s father was a TV newsman; Clooney knows the game well and swims in that pool. Clooney’s Governor Mike Morris and Gosling’s political hustler are liberals, not very religious, and, also, are only human.

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Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous is strictly an alternate view of history. The Earl of Oxford really writes Shakespeare’s plays (I chuckle when I read noble challengers to the authorship of Will Shakespeare, actor and son of a glove-maker). Here, Queen Elizabeth has bastards including the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Southampton (as her father’s daughter, she’d be more likely to kill them at birth than create rivals for the throne). And Elizabethan England is the site of many political plots (quite accurate), which works well for the audience. Photo right: Jody Richardson & Jamie Campbell as the young Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Oxford.

The Earl of Oxford, played masterfully by Rhys Ifans, has a number of comic turns when the man who accepts the role of public author of his plays, William Shakespeare, (played by Rafe Spall) turns out to be problematic, instead of his first choice, Ben Jonson (played by Sebastian Armesto). The historic Jonson was a competent poet, playwright and producer/director of his own plays—such as “Volpone.” In addition, Shakespeare was alleged to have acted in Jonson’s play “Every Man in His Humour” (1598). The acting is the best English actors can do, which is marvelous. Vanessa Redgrave, who plays the older Queen Elizabeth, may have given her best performance in this film. With a better vehicle, she’d have another Oscar.

Which movie did you like and why?

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Dr. Bob Blackwood, whose doctoral dissertation was on Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” a play written by a former English actor and glover’s son, is a colleague of Paul “Man in the Kitchen” Thompson. Blackwood’s story of fishing on the Bogachiel River near Forks, Washington, can be found on page 11 in this issue. At Forks, Blackwood sighted no vampires from “Twilight,” though a mysterious fellow in a cloak at a filling station was a dead ringer for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, or Bela Lugosi.