Whose Ides are you on?

In front of the camera, George Clooney is consistently some combination of charm, wit, panache and power. Behind it, he enjoys exploring the true nature of those with similar veneers. His subjects have been journalists, politicians and performing artists, the high-profile professions that fill his family tree. Perhaps with each successive directorial effort he is trying to rediscover something about himself.

While Clooney campaigns for peace in Darfur, calls for greater gun control or raises funds for the United Way, his latest film feels like a dramatized explanation of why the star Newsweek dubbed a “21st-century celebrity statesman” will always be found at the box office instead of the ballot box. But Clooney will run for office as director, co-writer and star of The Ides of March, a campaign-trail drama with Ryan Gosling’s cocksure spin doctor greasing the wheels of Clooney’s presidential bid.

The Farrugut North station sits near the crux of the Washington Metro Red Line that tunnels through downtown D.C. into the true heart of our political machinery, the big-bucks lobbying district. Beau Willimon, a former staffer who rode the rise-and-fall meteor of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, named his semi-autobiographical play after this throbbing underground artery. His play birthed Clooney’s new film and centers on political backstabbing, but the act of writing it was a form of backstabbing, too; an entry-level tell-all trendy among employees who turn low-rung work experiences into acts of self-defining whistle-blowing, forged at the altar of their bosses’ reputations and shielded by the almighty literary forcefield called “fiction.”

CEOs, beware your interns. They could be authors in disguise—authors like Lauren Weisberger, who based The Devil Wears Prada on her stint at Vogue under demanding fashion maven Anna “Nuclear” Wintour.

Unlike Prada, Farragut North could do little more to de-legitimize Howard Dean any more than his own “Dean Scream” did—but with its ominous Shakespearian title, Ides examines the eternal state of the war for power and political upper hand.

When Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599, he was referencing the paranoia that surrounded the childless and elderly Queen Elizabeth, who refused to name her successor. He peppered his text with anachronistic references to clocks and English hats as clues. Caesar even wears a heavy overcoat instead of a toga. The Roman dictator’s literal stabbing is a convenient historical allusion for the betrayal prevalent in Shakespeare’s time and also today.

“How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er, in states unborn and accents yet unknown!” Cassius exclaims after Caesar’s assassination. Maybe Clooney is never running for office because he’s read his Shakespeare. The works of the Oscar winner and the Bard agree. There is only one business dirtier than show business, and that’s politics.

The Ides of March debuts in theaters Oct. 7.

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Reach Jeff Roedel at [email protected].