The Trouble with Political Films Lately, Our Problem or Their Problem?

Over at the LA Times’ 24 Frames column, Steven Zeitchik ruminates on the notion that political dramas, Hollywood style, just don’t seem to work for modern audiences.  This, in response to the Ides of March, George Clooney’s tight, insightful thriller about politics and how it will corrupt anyone who dares to take it on.  I guess Zeitchik sees it as somewhat of a stumble, not necessarily for Ides but for any movie about politics now.

And yet “Ides” seems bound for the same ephemeral status as so many other political allegories that have come and gone over the last two decades: “Man of the Year,” “Swing Vote,” “Bulworth,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Wag the Dog,” “Atlas Shrugged,” The Manchurian  Candidate.”  They’re movies that run the ideological gamut, yet most of them garnered middling reactions from both critics and the American public. And almost none of them have endured (with the possible, though only possible, exception of “Wag the Dog”).

There are plenty of challenges to dramatizing Washington in this day and age. Among these much-digested issues: Real-life drama can seem so outlandish that no scripted entertainment can match it. Or, just as thorny, winds shift too quickly for most comments on the process to be relevant by the time a film comes out, let alone after the fact. There may or may not have been something novel in “Ides'” message about the toll the system takes on idealism years ago, before Barack Obama’s presidency; there’s not much fresh nearly three years into his term.

Compounding the problem is that most Hollywood studios don’t want to take a stand that will alienate any part of the moviegoing audience. So a movie of any respectable budget — even one from an avowed Democrat like Clooney — will resort to making general, relatively toothless points about ‘the system,’ instead of specific points about one ideology or another. That’s a kiss of death in a time when partisan politics run so high, and a little unexciting to boot.

You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t, though, right? Make a film that does take a sharp moral stand and you will be called out for preachy. Even liberals will attack fellow liberals like Sean Penn, for instance. Remember Fair Game? It took a very harsh liberal stance and it was overlooked by audiences and by the awards voters. Just try making a film that is overtly conservative and republican-leaning (although, The Blind Side?) and see how far you get.

The other problem, of course, is the ongoing dumbing down of audiences here in America through television, bad education, and movies made to appeal broadly, but mainly to 13 year-old boys. You have to figure many would be put off by Ides because they figure they won’t be able to understand it. I took my own 13 year-old to see it and she was riveted by it. “That was hard core, dude,” is how she put it.

Good, evil, right, wrong – these are the themes that are playing out in Clooney’s well written and well acted drama. I found it be one of the few films that reflects part of the blame for our political corruption on the people themselves – the people, who require far too much from their political leaders. No one can have everything — be a good leader and a great politician and also be faithful to his wife of 20 or 30 years. We need our leaders to be gods. We don’t want them to be men.

Just try getting elected if you aren’t married? If you are doing what Clooney does – serial relationships rather than long marriages with the occasional infidelity. Yet all the press and his fans can ever talk about it is who is the latest girlfriend and how long before he tosses her out when she says she wants to get married to him? Yet, just try doing that and running for office. Americans want perfection and therein is our biggest flaw. The Ides of March makes this all too clear.

And so, we enter the multiplex looking not for reality, not for yet more depressing news about the state of our messed up political environment, but for a break FROM reality. Far more audiences will want to see Clooney crying after his wife in The Descendants than dodging moral issues in The Ides of March. Clooney as faithful married husband is exactly the kind of Clooney audiences will want.

We look to films to take us away, many of us. It’s not that surprising that we would shy away from a film that is forcing us to take a good long look in the mirror.