Unbelievable is a word that got it's usage all twisted in recent years. People use it now as a synonym for 'extraordinary' or 'incredible.' Not me.
This review has plenty of spoilers. It's not meant for those who haven't already seen the movie. It's meant for those who want to know what others think about it.
On the plus side, it's got a cast of heavyweight actors (especially Philip Seymour Hoffman, and why does he have to chain smoke? Don't the producers know that people learn these bad habits from the movies?) so it's watchable. But as a story it's ..... unbelievable. Let me explain with a comparison: Think about Avatar. That movie begins by presenting us with a futuristic existence in a world with interplanetary space travel. Then we are introduced to a concept where people can lie down in a chamber and control a real live body which was designed to act on the hosts mental commands. That's absurd, isn't it? Yet once I accepted the basic premise, from then on, everything made sense. Now compare that to Ides of March: Set in modern day USA with ordinary people (no super powers etc.), what it presents to us should be reasonable. I don't mean to say an action flick where the hero never get's shot after 20 gunfights with automatic weapons. Those kind of movies we're trained to accept as pure fantasy whenever and wherever they are set.
I mean this movie is about characters who are set in a modern day election campaign, and it seems the key theme is the changing of one person from a loyal idealist into a ruthless selfish criminal. So the 1st key event is when Ryan Gosling, a key staffer in George Clooney's Presidential campaign, is given a call by Paul Giamatti, who is the head campaign manager of the rival candidate. Giamatti wants Gosling to meet him for a chat. Gosling hesitates, then agrees.
Giamatti offers Gosling a job if he will change sides because he thinks Gosling is so talented. Gosling declines, then goes back to his headquarters and tells his boss, Philip Seymour Hoffman about the interview and restates his loyalty to Clooney.
How does this differ from an engineer at Apple getting a call from a headhunter and offering them an interview at Google, to work on the latest Android OS for twice the pay? It happens all the time. It's legal. It's ethical, to the point the Apple engineer may have a nondisclosure agreement he signed when hiring in about proprietary technology. In the case of the movie, that doesn't count because at the same time, Hoffman was trying to woo a senator for an endorsement and gave away all the Clooney 'strategy' to what turned out to be the competition.
So Hoffman makes a big deal about the meeting Gosling had with Giamatti as if that was a big breach of ethics to find out what the guy wanted. Phony premise. Then what happens gets more unbelievable. Hoffman fires Gosling for having the meeting after leaking that 'story' (who would care about that) to the press, and Gosling then confronts Giamatti and agrees to work for him.
Giamatti laughs in his face and explains how smart he had been arranging this coup: He explains that if Gosling had originally jumped ship, that was a big win for him and if Gosling didn't he knew all about Hoffman's character and that Gosling would get fired anyways, so that would deprive Clooney of his talents which was the objective. A win-win for Giamatti.
That's all too much for me to buy. After that we learn what a rat everybody involved really is, with death, extortion and backstabbing all rearing their heads which isn't so unbelievable, except for one thing: If the people involved were so ruthless, how come nobody disappears in the middle of the night or while walking down the street? That would be realistic.
