The Manchurian Candidate Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)August 2nd, 2004
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
Directed by Jonathan Demme
With Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Shreiber
Rated R, 130 minutes
DENZEL BRAINWASHINGTON
Coming as it does on the heels of one political convention, and amidst the feverish anticipation of another, Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate strikes an intriguingly bipartisan note. It hammers the endless evocation of John Kerry's combat heroics and the programmed rote of George Bush's scripted straw man with equal relish. Everywhere you look there are echoes of Hillary and Condi, Cheney and Edwards, Halliburton and Enron, and the hollow sounds of campaign platitudes and promises that rattle an election year like hail on a tin roof.
It wasn't always Demme's The Manchurian Candidate. A couple of generations ago it was John Frankenheimer's, adapted from Richard Condon's novel of cold war paranoia. It starred Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury. It was about a plot by a foreign power to use brainwashing techniques to assassinate the President of the United States and install a puppet in his place. The movie was released in the fall of 1962; a year later John F. Kennedy was gunned down in a Dallas motorcade, and the movie was locked away in a vault for a quarter of a century before being reissued to much acclaim in the late ‘80s.
The villain then was Godless Communism. The villain now is Godless Capitalism, and the movie's title derives from a trans-national corporation called Manchurian Global, whose tentacles circle the planet with the ruthlessness of the international corporation of your choice. That Manchurian Global owns politicians and political candidates will come as no surprise to those whose interest in politics delves beneath the cosmetic surface; it is the nature and degree of ownership here that raises chills.
Captain Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) is a Desert Storm vet plagued by bad dreams. He discovers that a former member of his platoon (Jeffrey Wright) is having the same dreams. Another former comrade-in-arms, Raymond Shaw (Liev Shreiber) has parlayed the Medal of Honor he earned for saving the platoon into a political career. The trouble is, Marco's dreams conjure up an alternate version of what happened out there in the Kuwaiti desert. The dreams call up images of a laboratory and mad scientists and microchip implants and mind control and cold-blooded murder. And although the entire platoon describes Shaw's heroics in identical words ("…the bravest, warmest, most selfless human being I've ever known…"), nobody really remembers what happened. Even Shaw himself isn't sure. "I remember that it happened," he tells Marco, "but I don't remember it happening."
When the Machiavellian machinations of his Senator mother (Meryl Streep) net Congressman Shaw his party's Vice Presidential nomination, Marco lurches into action to try to solve the puzzle. To say much more about the plot would be to dull its impact, although one of the problems with the remake of a classic is that the plot is already known, or at least vaguely remembered, by a good chunk of its audience.
Demme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne ("The Sum of All Fears") and Dean Gergaris have dealt with that problem in part by mixing up the characters. Washington's Marco combines elements of the characters played by Sinatra and Harvey; Shreiber doubles up the role of Shaw and his stepfather in the original, title character Johnny Iselin. The nuts and bolts are modernized with space age technology, and the story is scrambled into a 21st century omelet. It doesn't have the clean, sleek lines of its predecessor, which was further streamlined by its black and white photography, but this version has a crowded, colorful turbulence that seems to suit the times. Gone are some of the powerful iconic images of Frankenheimer's version – the game of solitaire that triggers Shaw's hypnotic trance, the Queen of Diamonds costume fatefully sported by his lady love. Gone is some of the emotion as well – Demme doesn't allow subordinate character and romance to bloom the way Frankenheimer did, which fatally leeches the impact from a crucial scene. Gone too is some of the logic – a logic that may have been fanciful, but had an internal consistency that let us believe what it had to sell (in a movie, the threshold of credibility is whatever the movie says it is.) And gone is the hard cleanness of the ending, fumbled away by what the director described to Charlie Rose as his affection for the central character.
But Demme directs with pace and sureness, and many of his scenes are memorable. Again, there's some damage inflicted to the movie's balance by Demme's deference to Denzel, but the acting is first rate. Washington burns with shell-shocked intensity and Streep chews scenery with a gourmet's relish – watch her crack a cube of ice between sharp teeth and you know everything you need to know about her character. Liev Schreiber stakes out the middle ground, fashioning a young politician who is both charismatic war hero and lost boy.
American Poet Laureate Billy Collins has observed that all poetry is a dialogue with the poetry of the past. "In a sense, all poems are about some other poem," he says. "You're always riffing on earlier work." The same is true of cinema; with a remake, it's true in spades. The Manchurian Candidate is a conversation between ‘60s slyness and contemporary angst, between the Cold War and the War on Terror, between Halliburton and the Red menace, between implacable ideology and ruthless pragmatism. To my mind the earlier version has the better of the exchange, but it's still a worthwhile conversation. In this season of an urgently contested political campaign for what is seen by many as the soul of this country, this is another of the movies that will throw some fuel on the fire.
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