All hail Emperor Clooney! The Ides of March is such a smart movie. It explains politics the way Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos – with flair. It distills pure entertainment from a subject most of us find either aggravating or plain dull. And then to make it Shakespearean where you delve into what drives character without being pedantic or superficial, to make it modern Shakespeare, downright genius. Ides star George Clooney himself is pretty fascinating.

His father is a well-known journalist and social activist who tried politics although it didn’t take, Nick Clooney, and it may have been growing up in Nick’s household that made George take an intelligent stock of the world he lived in, to sift the truth from the lies people live every day.

To become a Hollywood heart-throb and not lose focus on what ails people outside Hollywood (look what he did for Haiti), to make movies like Up In The Air and Syriana while he does Intolerable Cruelty and Ocean’s, that takes a man of many seasons who has a firm grip on his Self. He also has the courage to make a movie as self-revealing (for America as a whole) as this. In Ides, he plays presidential candidate Governor Mike Morris, a man whose addiction to integrity is completely frightening because he actually believes it of himself, while in reality he has as many fatal flaws as the next man. One of them is sleeping with an attractive intern, which, after Clinton, is a No-No.

“You can lie, you can cheat, you can start a war, you can bankrupt the country,” says one of his campaign managers Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), “but you can’t f**k the intern….they get you for that.” Although you know from the beginning that you are going to hear the worst of the chest-thumping rhetoric that marks the American apart from the rest of the world community, it still causes a cringe to hear men in power spout lines like: “My religion is a piece of paper – the Constitution of the United States of America.” Groan. But this is not a feel-good movie. Instead, it will display like a cadaver how a couple of idealists like Morris and Meyers follow the primrose path to hell and how everyone around them is infected with their hubris. There are two scenes in particular which I found particulary disturbing.

One was when Morris realises that Meyers is onto him, and the hate that fills his face is so quietly threatening that it’s like watching ice crack under your feet. The other is the last scene when Meyers says to a journalist, “You’re my best friend,” with a cold-blooded understanding that they have both sold their souls to the devil and it’s reflected in his dead eyes; this can only be produced by a director who knows exactly what he’s doing. Who is the director? George Clooney. Just watch the way he sets up each scene, whether it’s the first surprising entry of a political candidate who turns out to be someone else, to the sound of a phone ringing that will soon tell Morris who has his future in their hands, or three men who huddle together like sophisticated witches over an invisible cauldron and decide a nation’s future.

It’s so intriguing that Clooney has allowed Gosling first billing in Ides of March, that he doesn’t hog face-time in front of the camera. Clooney is a lot like Eastwood in that respect; neither has anything to prove. There is not a single actor here whom Clooney hasn’t coerced to give their personal best.

Gosling was well on his way to being a heart-throb just like George with The Notebook, although he reminds me of DiCaprio with that uber-cool, touch-me-not air, but in Ides he has shown a maturity that is likely to keep growing. Or maybe it’s just that luscious lower lip that we like. The rest already have their gold stars: Marisa Tomei as the cynical journalist, the always terrific duo of Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti who play world-weary aides with cutting brilliance and, good lord, the good-time-girl that is Evan Rachel Wood as the committed intern (everybody shows two or more sides to their personalities in this passion play) who plays a bad game of dice with Fate.

Wood, I presume, will probably get some kind of award ceremony all shook up in the near future even though her claim to fame so far has been True Blood, Mildred Pierce and dating Marilyn Manson. The success of Ides is that it keeps us on the edge of our seats with no CGI, no 3D, no Megan Fox, only face-to-face with that most awful of sights – the mirror. We stagger out of the theatre with the heart-sinking knowledge that we have tried as a civilisation to be better than we are. Until this moment, we continue to fail.

Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian Express and Cosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs at http://shebathayil.blogspot.com/