In this weekend’s “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” Ryan Gosling plays a super-confident, smooth-talking, charming ladies’ man and it looks like he’s reprising that role again only this time, his easy smile and perfect hair will only go so far.
Set to open the Venice Film Festival, be a big ticket item at TIFF and a major Oscar player this fall, George Clooney‘s “The Ides of March” finds Gosling trying to navigate the murky personal and ethical waters of a political campaign and having trouble finding air. Loosely based on the 2004 Democratic primary run of Howard Dean, the story takes place just weeks before the state’s Democratic caucuses officially commence, following the exploits of a twenty-something presidential campaign spinmeister/wunderkind named Stephen Myers (Gosling) and the dirty pool he plays to get his candidate (played by Clooney) the nomination against a rival senator. And yeah, this thing is going to be an acting powerhouse. Paul Giamatti plays the campaign manager of the rival senator played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei is a New York Times reporter and Evan Rachel Wood stars as an intern for Myers’ campaign who has her eyes on Stephen.
Clooney recently said that he had planned to make the movie back in 2008 but delayed the production as the nation was in too hopeful a mood “for a cynical political movie. Now the cynicsm seems to have come back.” And indeed, there is a wickedly dark tone that runs through the trailer, one in which no one putting their hands into the political sphere gets away clean.
So far, so good — this one does indeed look like an early contender, at the very least in the acting categories (Gosling, Giamatti and Hoffman in particular all seem to be right on point). “The Ides of March” opens on October 7th.