Starring George Clooney. Directed by George Clooney. Screenplay by George Clooney. I think it’s pretty safe to say that The Ides of March is George Clooney‘s brainchild, and the amount of passion that he put into the making of the film is palpable. It’s well-crafted and smart, with just one or two minor missteps keeping it out of Oscar territory. Considering that the story is BCE in origin, though, Clooney and the rest of his team do a great job of telling it intelligently and well.

It’s important to understand that The Ides of March is not a retelling of the classic story. Instead, Clooney, along with fellow writers Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, has told a modern story that speaks of many of the same ideas—honor, integrity, patriotism, and justice—ideas which are incredibly important and volatile in today’s political climate. The only problem, therefore, is that these ideas have been covered so often before in media throughout the post-Clinton years, and Ides doesn’t say anything new or exciting enough to break away from the pack.

As the title suggests, Ides (adapted from the play Farragut North by co-writer Willimon) is very Caesarian in nature—a great politician in the form of Mike Morris (Clooney) stands at the precipice of uniting the country. Guided by his closest advisers Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the idealistic Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), Morris is only restrained from getting the Democratic nomination by the opposing campaign, which is run by Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti). All Morris has to do is win the Ohio primary, which incidentally happens on March 15th (making the title more contemporary, as well as symbolic), in order to cinch the nomination. Of course, however, even though Morris has an incredible lead and the campaign is confident, everything starts to go horribly, horribly wrong. The correlations between the classic story and this contemporary one are easily visible. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is my favorite play of the Bard’s, so Ides had some pretty big shoes to fill, at least for me, and for the most part, it succeeded.

For such a dynamite, star-studded cast, it is a testament to his skill as a director that Clooney was able to craft such a dynamic ensemble performance out of all these personalities. Like its Shakespearean counterpart, while Clooney‘s Morris is the central, driving figure of the story, he appears in very few scenes overall. Even Gosling‘s Myers, who is certainly the protagonist of the tale, is very quickly revealed to be just one of many pieces on the chessboard. While Clooney is in classically good form, it is Gosling, Hoffman, and Evan Rachel Wood, who plays a young intern for Morris’ campaign, that are the true forces on screen, each of them giving a performance as multifaceted and dynamic as the next.

There is some absolutely stunning filmmaking at work here—Clooney definitely has

some talent. His use of shadow to convey the conflict inside each of the characters (although especially Gosling‘s Myers) is truly breathtaking, so much so that it occasionally takes the viewer out of the diagetic world, albeit for the best of reasons. The cinematography is gorgeous, but it doesn’t take any risks—romantic scenes are primarily close-ups and there are times when a little bit of the “talking head problem” comes out. However, despite these drawbacks, even better than the use of lighting is the use of sound, which is frequently manipulated to its utmost capabilities. Single conversations and sounds in a sea of cheers and applause are isolated, augmented, made hypnotic: in one scene in particular, the buzzing of a vibrating cell phone is made to be absolutely terrifying. It’s in these little touches that the movie comes alive, that differentiate it from other political films and give it a character of its own.

It’s not that the message of the film isn’t clear, or that it’s not properly conveyed; on the contrary, the technical elements are subtle and implicative, and Gosling‘s fracturing mask of professionalism wonderfully conveys his mixed emotions of patriotism, envy, and duty. The only problem is that everything it says has just been said before, and more eloquently. Aaron Sorkin had seven long seasons of The West Wing to say it in a much more complex way, and it’s hard for a film of this nature to top an achievement of that magnitude. I may be biased, of course—I grew up watching that wonderful series—but Ides just didn’t quite hit home for me. The most frustrating part is that it was so close to getting there, its exquisite execution bringing it all the nearer.

If you want to see Ryan Gosling in a great movie, see Drive. The Ides of March is definitely worth a viewing, and while you won’t be consciously disappointed, it also won’t stick in your memory for any significant length of time. It’s just all been done before.