The Manchurian Candidate: Los Paranoias Redux

The Manchurian Candidate:
Los Paranoias Redux
by Dileep Rao

The remake of John Frankenheimer's taut 1962 thriller opened across the country Friday, and it is both better than it has a right to be and a bit off the mark. Jonathan Demme takes Frankenheimer's chair for this outing of Richard Condon's novel. His camera direction is assured, reminding us of the fluid and creepy skill displayed in The Silence of the Lambs. Tak Fujimoto's cinematography is good if a bit pedestrian.

The film's subject is that of political machinations, corporate malfeasance and secret technology. Liev Schreiber plays a young congressman whose Senator mother (deliciously played with Jocasta-like fervor by Meryl Streep) ruthlessly jockeys to put him on the Presidential ticket for an unnamed political party, one with populist social leanings and iron-willed foreign policy aims. In other words, the world is much like the one we face, but with a bit more hyperbolic spin and greater chasms in the electorate.

Denzel Washington plays the film's protagonist, Benjamin Marco. This last sentence is difficult to write, though, because Marco himself is presented as such a whacked-out man, loosely grasping at the threads of logic, that he is hardly credible. Also, Washington seems uninterested in exploring the doubt or ache that shadows the lonely conspiracy believer; he is, as always, more apt to embrace his notion as the sure, noble truth teller. This dilutes both the film and our relation to his character. It is also a disservice to the structure of the film, detracting from the intricate plot twists and eventual payoffs that take place later.

Streep is a knockout as Senator Shaw, a devilish blend of Liddy Dole and Hilary Clinton, with enough of Lady Macbeth's acid ambition to steal every scene she's in. She continues to be an actress of singular talent and irrepressible genius, doing more in two scenes than many actors (this film is littered with them) can in a career. Schreiber is also very good--humane, charming and scarily aware of his role in an elaborate dance of death. Also noteworthy is Jeffrey Wright, who shows the real agitation that would have captivated Marco had the character been played by an actor less interested in being perceived heroically and more interested in doing what he once did--acting with courageous abandon. Mr. Washington is a great talent, but his ego is now blocking any view we might have of it.

The film's plot is not surprising but it does delight as it unfolds, at least for a while. The attention to production detail is extraordinary: bits and pieces of casual behavior fold together in wisps and whispers the way only a conspiracy can, interlocking to form the plot as it propels itself forward as if charged by compressed air. The film captures the intellectual madcap dash to place all the pieces together as if running across a broken ice floe, hunting in split seconds for footing and barely staying above the icy waters of death. Unfortunately, after its exhilirating 90-minute balancing act, the film falls face first into the glacial waters, crumbling under the silliness of not having thoroughly thought through its plot. The flaw is ultimately in the script.

We must now do this film the unenviable but utterly deserved dishonor of comparison. Every remake, for its shame at unoriginality, must bear this parallax examination. Demme's film, for all its updates, does not equal the crispness, simplicity and moral resonance of Frankenheimer's film. The original Manchurian Candidate featured a stark palette of black and white, leaving the simple visual device of the Queen of Diamonds as a cipher, a power we couldn't see. And the original film's outcome and its movement were assured, as the conspiracy was of mortal threat: the communist fascists were attempting a coup. This was a credible threat, as were the use of personal ambition and the human desire for power as this villain's chief tools. In the 2004 version, though, all of this is weaker.

In the end, the biggest problem is that the motive of the antagonist--the mega corporation Manchurian Global--is never made clear. Manchurian Global puts into effect its unsurprising plan to "put a sleeper into the Whitehouse," as Washington's Marco puts it. But why would a corporation go to such horrific expense and moral repugnancy, just for the general idea of "controlling the President?" I mean, to go to such lengths, wouldn't a corporation have more on its mind than simply money? This question is never addressed though, and the hints and fragments that show the corporation's greed are much too vague to offer any sort of explanation.

Anyway, everyone knows a President can be controlled far more easily and economically than this, without the need for surgical alteration, implantation, memory erasure and conspiracy. Just ask Enron, Halliburton or GE.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.