Originally published 9/9/04
The Manchurian Candidate
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writers: Screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the screenplay by George Axelrod and the novel by Richard Condon
Producers: Jonathan Demme, Ilona Herzberg, Scott Rudin, Tina Sinatra
Stars: Denzel Washingston, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Kimberly Elise, Jon Voight
When the characters in this remake of 1962’s landmark paranoid head-trip thriller The Manchurian Candidate speak of a tentacular global conglomerate that profits handsomely from war and enjoys influence at the highest levels of government, no bonus points if you can guess of whom in the real world we should be thinking.
In fact, no bonus points will be awarded at all, because the elements of this movie which are meant to provide a chilling satiric commentary are its weakest, and end up serving as a distraction in an otherwise well-mounted vehicle for suspense.
Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) is smart enough to see that this is a story about being off-balance, of trying to function when you’re more lost and confused than you want to admit to the world. He comes into scenes later than you would expect, he lets major characters step on the playing field without much introduction. He even uses one of his photographic trademarks, having characters strongly centered and facing directly into the camera in conversation scenes, to unsettle. Huge, troubled faces loom over us, challenge us, intimidate us, and we’re checking the corners of the frame for scary things to slide in.
See, it’s not easy for Capt. Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) to ever feel stable about what’s going on. Once a capable Army Ranger, he’s now constantly one step from being a sputtering wreck. He remembers a mission he was on during the Gulf War, when his squadron was ambushed, he was knocked out, and the weird, quiet Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) suddenly turned Rambo, gunning down helicopters and leading the so-called “Lost Patrol” out of harm’s way.
Shaw, the previously wayward son of a storied political dynasty (I told you, no bonus points), returned a hero, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and was swept into Congress. Now his dynamo of a mother, Sen. Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep, providing another brilliant high-wire act in humanizing an astonishing beast of a character) is leaning on, or more accurately, shoving and bullying, her party’s leadership to put her son on the upcoming ticket as the nominee for Vice-President. The Presidential nominee is a governor from some nowhere Plains state, she argues. Shaw’s war heroics will add testosterone.
Trouble is, Marco’s starting to suspect that those heroics may not have happened. And so we’re off down a rabbit hole of mind implants, druggings, post-hypnotic suggestion, and grisly nightmares of a torture center in the desert. Marco’s got a hell of a handicap: if your brain is the only tool you have, can you trust it when it’s such an unreliable witness? If what you thought you knew is what they wanted you to know, how do you know what you know now is what they really don’t want you to know? I could go on all day.
Gradually he comes to theorize that Manchurian Global, a hedge fund with its fingers in any pie that involves geopolitical human misery, is scheming to put a puppet in the White House. Not just an amiably pliable politician, but a literal puppet – one that can be activated by saying in just the right way – “Sergeant Shaw? Sergeant Raymond Shaw? Raymond…Prentiss Shaw?” And Shaw will smile, and relax, and listen, and even throttle someone to death if that is what you ask him to do.
Both Washington and Schreiber are at the top of their game here. Each has only the briefest of scenes at the beginning to detail the people they were before the “Lost Patrol” incident, the better to contrast with the transformed people they are now. As Marco, Washington is righteous in his quest as a hero should be, but he’s also fearful and temperamental, angrily trying to hold his thoughts together before they slither away.
And Schreiber, maybe the most under-appreciated actor in movies today (watch him bring inner life even to paycheck roles like the black ops soldier in The Sum of All Fears), charts for us in fractured order an entire life of Raymond Shaw. In and around his scenes, nearly all of which happen in the public eye, behind his politician’s smile he flashes us glimpses of the competing influence of his parents, the wound of a lost romance, the smallest of rebellious attempts to establish his own ego, and the confused embrace of his golden child destiny. He’s doing the best he can even as he wanders the fog of his brain to figure out how he got here. It’s one of those acting jobs whose versatility you don’t even notice until later, as you take stock of just how much you have learned about Shaw’s emotional formula.
Demme has always made a point of casting strong actors even in minimal parts, and he continues here – veteran actor Dean Stockwell, for example, doesn’t have much more to do than smoke a cigar, but he manages to smoke it in a very slimy, ethically-challenged plutocrat sort of way. On the flip side, Al Franken’s appearance as a political reporter proves all-too-cute a distraction. The “news channel” he works for serves as a pseudo-objective cheerleader for those in power, dishes up lots of breathless empty commentary and whooshing graphics, and I absolutely swear to you no bonus points are being awarded.
While the original Manchurian couldn’t lean on gore, and had to turn your head around in different ways (like the infamous “garden lecture” scene), we’re running in a milieu of troubled minds that seems unchanged since David Fincher made Seven. We’ve got the grimy flophouses, the journals scribbled in very small handwriting, crazy-quilt collages of disturbing pictures, and twitchy un-shaven men popping pills and roaming through the mess in search of themselves. The conspiracy plot that unfolds is well-paced and plotted, and Manchurian Global even makes for a good villain (replacing the sinister Chinese Communists of the original), when it’s not being used to hammer home a message.
The Manchurian Candidate has always been a great story. The chilling thought of someone deciding, for efficiency’s sake, to simply eliminate the middle man and jack directly into our brain to achieve political goals will always resonate with American audiences, I think. The movie’s best when it focuses on doing justice to this story, not what the story’s trying to say about our own world.