Venice Film Festival 2011: Ides Of March, Carnage and WE

“You know what they say about expectations? Expectations lead to disappointments.” So speaks the other Wallis in Madonna's second directorial outing WE. She might easily have been talking about the festival as the film she was in, which, though far from Terrence Malick, was really not the car crash that many were predicting. Venice 68, on paper, promised to be one of those magical years that come along very rarely; a festival packed full with long-awaited auteur efforts, from directors who have long since lacked much use for their first names. Polanski, Cronenberg Soderbergh and Ferrara were all bringing their new films, with very exciting offers from smaller filmmakers like Andrea Arnold, Steve McQueen and, most anticipated by me, Mary Harron. It couldn't possibly be that good, could it? Quite a lot of people – I think some of them are even journalists – coughed up 60€ to buy press accreditation and find out whether the 2011 edition could survive the hype.

The festival kicked off with George Clooney's Ides Of March, a very, very decent political thriller starring man of the hour Ryan Gosling as Stephen, a spin doctor who works for one man and one man only – the ultra-liberal Governor Morris (Clooney), a handsome, Clinton-esque Democrat running in the early rounds of the Presidential race. Stephen is meticulous and idealistic; if it were not for Morris, he says, he wouldn't be in such a dirty game. As you might imagine, though, from one one of the world's most recognisable and intelligent movie stars, appearances are only skin deep. As the election shifts into gear, Stephen falls for a pretty young intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), but what starts with innocent flirting ends up as something far more complex, when Stephen uncovers a shocking secret. The twist, such as it is, has been blurted out in several reviews online, but the best way to approach Ides Of March is cold.

The supporting performances by Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman are each a masterclass in themselves, but just when you think he's taking a back seat, Clooney himself rises to the occasion with some very dark and even rather chilling scenes. Wood is good, too, as the vulnerable Molly, and though it doesn't quite deliver the Sidney Lumet-style intrigue it promises, Ides Of March is a confident, satisfying look at American politics that reveals the system there as a war game, to be fought by any means necessary.

So, things are looking good after the Clooney. And what of Roman Polanski's Carnage, adapted from the stage play God Of Carnage when the fugitive director was under house arrest? Well, the good news is that it's really great, light fun, perhaps a little too flimsy in story but very rich in performances. The cast were given a standing ovation at the press conference, which is usually a good sign for awards success (Colin Firth and Mickey Rourke both received one, for A Single Man and The Wrestler respectively), so place your bets now for Oscar nominations. How they will carve up the categories, however, is anyone's guess. Is it a film with four leads or four supporting actors? My hunch is that the men will be downgraded to supporting and the women bumped up to leads.

It takes place in the course of one night when the Longstreets (Jodie Foster and John C Reilly) invite the Cowans (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) into their Manhattan apartment to discuss a recent spat between their two 11-year-old boys, which has left the Longstreets' boy with broken teeth and a cut face. The comedy, which teeters very close to farce at times, comes almost solely from the characters, with Reilly and Waltz being especially delicious as the husbands, Alan and Michael, alternately fighting and bonding while their wives Pen (Foster) and Nancy (Winslet) become drunk, self-righteous and hysterical. There may be a touch of the Bunuels about it (why, exactly, can't the Cowans ever seem to leave?), but this is one of Polanski's most successful and original black comedies.

Thumbs up for Polanski, then. And on to WE, Madonna's follow-up to the little-seen Filth And Wisdom and one of the hottest tickets of the festival, probably for all the wrong reasons. I have to report, though, that, although the film does have some jarringly ill-judged moments, this is not the vanity-project gibberish that many were expecting. Having said that, though, it's far too long, messy in its storytelling and, above all, simply too hectic to hang together.

I wondered if Madonna might do what Tom Ford did, which was to – very reasonably – look at the movies he liked and steal from them. A Single Man was a deftly researched and very visual film that created an aesthetic palette and stuck with it. Madonna, though, is not as disciplined. The film races though timescales and styles that cohere, just about, for the first hour and then plummet in the last 50 minutes. Which is a shame, since the film has some lovely touches. It begins in the early 20th century, where Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), an American socialite, is living in Shanghai with her abusive husband.

As the film, in flashback, proceeds to document Simpson's rise through the society ranks to become the King's mistress, at her second husband's expense, Madonna introduces a more modern character – Wally (Abbie Cornish), a young Manhattan woman with fertility issues, who, in 1998, is coming to terms with her own marriage issues. It's the standard framing device – using the present, or near-present – to contextualise the past, but it simply doesn't work here. Imagine how long and boring Titanic would be if James Cameron kept cutting back to Rose and you have an idea of how tedious this becomes. However, Madonna does get good performances out of her leads, especially Riseborough as the determined Simpson, and the period scenes do come alive in a way that the arty, glibly written New York scenes do not.

There are some very poor choices. Simpson dances a demented charleston with what looks like Josephine Baker to the sounds of the Sex Pistols – and is that really David Suchet as Mohamed Al-Fayed*? But the sad thing is that a much better film is lurking in here, about the most romantic romance of possibly all time, how it affected the players and how it imprisoned them in an ivory tower of the public's making. I wanted to see that film, not the two ill-fitting semi-films bolted together here.

(* No, it is Haluk Bilginer.)