The Ides of March Post-Release

I'd say it's a little better than Moneyball, and definitely worth seeing. Performances are all aces, but it never breaks out of its origins on the stage and always feels sort of confined as a result. It certainly adds a claustrophobic dimension to the proceedings, which is quite nice, but Clooney's attempts at stylization come across as unnecessary and actually dilute the film, which would have been far more effective with less cutting, longer takes, and less close-ups to emphasize the great script and performances and general "realness" of it.

That approach might have tried an audience's patience a little more, but as it stands the film flies by and comes to a (very intentionally) sudden resolution (which I wouldn't change). They could've slowed up a bit and let the movie take its time -- drain the melodrama out and let it be more of a campaign-trail document, insofar as that's possible. The bombastic, driving score doesn't help matters -- this is the kind of film that would've benefitted from little to no music.

The political side of it is very interesting. On the one hand, we see Democrats doing a shit-ton of morally questionable stuff and having their ideals corrupted all throughout the film. On the other, there are no Republican characters in the movie (thus they have no voice) and the film is very diligent in giving Clooney's character the time to very eloquently articulate a great many of the principal tenets Democrats rest their beliefs on. And it does perpetuate the stereotypes of both parties, with Democrats being the sensitive, naive ones who have to toughen up and Republicans basically being mean pricks who have the balls to railroad the competition (insofar as they are even mentioned).

For these reasons, it certainly has a dimension of propaganda and, as a left-winger, I ultimately found it to be comfort food rather the all-condemning anti-political polemic it sometimes feels like it wants to be. But yeah -- see it.

That's true. It does have the feeling of a Shakespearean tragedy, and I think you have a point in saying the melodrama was the point -- but for me I might say that the real-world political aspects of it infringe too strongly on the high drama. As a result you have a movie caught between two completely disparate worlds, and one that never fully manages to reconcile them -- despite the fact that trying to do so was definitely a noble goal for Clooney to set out with. He either should have gone full-on melodrama (in which the film should have been far more emotionally affecting, which it seems to have little interest in being) or full on docudrama (a la Good Night and Good Luck or something Soderbergh).

I dunno. Good Night and Good Luck rode the wave and in many ways was exemplary of the politically-conscious, aggressively left-wing Hollywood filmmaking trend that arose around 2005 and then petered out pretty fast, but Clooney wisely erred on the side of docudrama there. The story of Murrow vs. McCarthyism could have been approached in a way that really lionized Murrow with a ton of drama (think a swelling John Williams score or something of that nature), but instead Clooney found a very restrained and extremely period-specific approach that dilutes the aspects of propaganda in the movie. They are definitely there, especially considering what was going on politically at the time of the movie's release -- which it is undoubtedly drawing parallels with -- but you could also make the argument that it's trying hard to present events as they actually were, without putting too much of an ideological spin on it. With Ides, the ideology dominates the movie and realism is more or less discarded.

That doesn't make any difference. You could make a "non-fiction" movie (which does not actually exist -- the documentary is the cinematic equivalent of literary non-fiction) and lather it in propaganda and ideology, or you could make a fictional film that is less obviously ideological. In fact, with all the careful positioning of "non-fiction" films, like Lincoln and Bigelow's Bin Laden film, on the release schedule so as to avoid being drawn into the election, you could argue a non-fiction film is more naturally inclined to be propaganda than a purely fictional work.

Well, you were saying that Clooney was a left-wing propagandist, so that's the debate if there is one. I like the guy, so I'm just giving him his due defense. No offense/fight-picking intended.