George Clooney expends little energy hiding his political preferences.
He’s a classic liberal, and some of his film selections bear that out. It’s hard to imagine a conservative actor lunging at the chance to star in films like “Syriana” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the latter Clooney both co-starred in and directed.
Which makes Clooney’s upcoming project all the more intriguing.
“The Ides of March,” based on the play “Farragut North,” casts Clooney as a presidential candidate whose key advisor (Ryan Gosling) is torn between loyalty and doing the right thing. The cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and Evan Rachel Wood.
The film’s trailer seems utterly apolitical in tone. But the play was written by a former advisor to Howard Dean loosely based on Dean’s hard-left 2004 primary campaign. It’s hard to imagine the film will straddle the ideological fault lines.
So why hide it?
Would a partisan trailer diminish the film’s potential audience? And if so, why make the movie in the first place? Hollywood bends over backward to appeal to a mass audience. When Bruce Willis returned for a fourth “Die Hard” feature, the filmmakers included Justin Long to reach out young uns who didn’t grow up on Willis’ John McLane character. The same belief likely led Steven Spielberg and co. to hire Shia LaBeouf for the fourth “Indiana Jones” installment.
Test screenings exist to calculate ways to lure the biggest crowds possible. Entire subplots get yanked for fear of upsetting a potential audience bloc. The upcoming “Red Dawn” remake switched the villains from Chinese to North Koreans in post-production for fear of offending the Chinese film market.
If “March” offers a partisan argument that will alienate ticket buyers is it fair that the trailer hides it?
We can blame the recent batch of partisan films for scaring some movie goers away from considering opposing viewpoints. Past ideological films delivered a message while entertaining the masses. You didn’t have to be a card-carrying member of the ACLU to enjoy Michael Douglas’s attempts to find love in “The American President.” Hawkish viewers who watched “Platoon” with dry eyes would be hard to find.
Lately, films like “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “Stop Loss” stumble in the storytelling department, leaving viewers with little more than 24-hour news channel-style talking points.
Clooney has proven himself a capable director with projects like “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” and even if “March” packs a partisan wallop it still could deliver grand entertainment. But a more honest trailer would serve the film – and its potential audience – better.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
If the recent past is any indication, the movie will very likely be the first of several feature length Democratic party political ads in the theaters.
I note that the later anti-Bush-Iraq war films also claimed to not be “political”. My take on that is that the hard left has a very chauvinist mindset – it’s not politics, it’s just the truth. It could also be an attempt to get some independents to wander in and get the “message”.
I don’t trust George Clooney enough to make an apolitical movie, but I’m hoping he can make a good one since I’m going to see this film no matter what. Why? It’s filmed in my hometown of Cincinnati! And not just in some random loft of Cincinnati, but with real Cincinnati landmarks like the Roebling Suspension Bridge. Clooney, a local boy, knows his symbolism too, placing shady political calls in the shadow of Paul Brown Stadium.
We know Clooney dislikes conservatives from past statements and movies, so it would be hard for him to prove this film’s non-partisan nature. Conservatives are used to his treatment of us, so whether its non-partisan or not, mostly, we’re going to just assume it’s partisan anyway. If it is a political hit piece and he’s hiding it, I assume, those who will see it for that reason are already sold on it and people will avoid it for that reason will still likely avoid it. So while hiding the fact is silly, I do think it will have little effect on the film’s audience and potential audience overall.
This is simply another attempy by the left to hide their true intenitons and to help those who only watch news when it has a movie trailer attached to it argue on film blogs. I have had several discussions over this movie on supposedly neutral sites that Bash the Palin Doc, but give anything a leftist Hollywood icon puts out a label of non partisan.
Clooney is hardly a classic liberal. People of that nature allowed for an ideological back-and-forth and agreeing to disagree in order to keep the overall health of the U.S. intact. Clooney’s a modern liberal through and through: one-sided, attack-mode and utterly ignorant beyond party-line talking points.
Still, I really, really dig Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
Eric … you’re right. I often counter liberals who cannot even concede the other side could have a point by gently reminding them what ‘liberal’ means. That often stops them, but only for a moment.
Synonyms
1. progressive. 7. broad-minded, unprejudiced. 9. beneficent, charitable, openhanded, munificent, unstinting, lavish. See generous. 10. See ample.
I have more fun calling them “re-gressives” as they typically offer suggestions and alternatives which have rarely to never worked in the past, but that’s only when I’m looking for a fight, which honestly has occurred a lot less since turning 40. Damn this maturity …
Man, it’s good to be a liberal Democrat. Even if you’re a goofy-looking guy whose presidential campaign completely self-destructs, you still get a big-budget movie about you, with George Clooney playing you.