The Manchurian Candidate: A Review.

March 24, 2008 in Article
Tags: conspiracy, film, manchurian candidate, movie, politics, review

Jonathan Demme of “The Silence of the Lambs” fame, whose last film, “The Truth About Charlie”, was an ill-begotten update of Stanley’s Donen’s “Charade”, has crafted an exhilarating, if politically wishy-washy, modern-day reimagining of Frankenheimer’s gem. I was somewhat dubious going into this film as I had seen the flawless original and wasn’t convinced a remake needed to be done, especially in today’s political climate. To my surprise the film was enjoyable, and much of the credit goes to the political spin and the three main players, Denzel Washington as the paranoid veteran, Liev Schreiber as the titular character and Meryl Streep as the power-hungry, oedipally motivated Senator Eleanor Shaw.

While John Frankenheimer’s film was the apotheosis of the Cold War thriller and a mocking reflection of McCarthyism, Jonathan Demme’s remake is less underhanded in its approach, but takes cutting stabs at current politics, the corruptibility of world leaders and paranoia cloaked as partisanship in a post 9/11 United States. But, like the original, it effectively targets the political anxieties of liberal America. A problem with this remake is how does one recast the great evil moving behind the scenes? In 1962 it was the Communists who meant to put a sleeper agent in the White House; here it is a multinational corporation, Manchurian Global, which means to put their man in power. At first glance this might seem a more subtle, insidious and, if you believe Michael Moore, authentic threat. Who were the real winners of the Cold War, after all? The naive interpretation would be that democracy prevailed. The paranoid interpretation would be that some monstrous parody of democratic capitalism, a ruthless corporate oligarchy, was in fact the victor.

It’s interesting to note that the puppet candidate is a Democrat. Though he’s not specifically defined as such, we can derive this from some of the strategy chatter that goes on around him. It’s a gallant nod toward political impartiality by Demme, but, since the effort seems disingenuousness (Demme’s film is, even by loose standards, anti-Bush), the director comes across as somewhat politically timorous.

So while it’s probable that Demme saw the re-make as a chance to comment on the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the White House, with Dick Cheney in the role of his controller, his Candidate is a relatively subtle one compared with Frankenheimer’s. Sadly, like most conspiracy theories, the political analysis offered by The Manchurian Candidate is too neat to be credible, and consequently does more to obscure than illuminate contemporary American politics.

The film contains an obvious cynical tendency. As much as it’s evidently a condemnation of big business’ control of politics, it also denounces the leaders’ desire to keep the public on edge with terror alerts and the like, as Senator Shaw points out, “The assassin always dies. It’s necessary for the national healing.” But after maintaining its cynicism for most of the film, it falls apart entirely at the conclusion. Demme and his writers cop out with a pointless and inexplicable denouement in relation to previous plot developments. It’s almost as if they gave in to appease some mindless preview audience or dimwitted studio hack. Or, maybe they envisioned it just like this.

Perhaps it was necessary to reach back 42 years to find a work of power and substance to remind us of just how dangerous it is to allow modern technology to fall into the hands of the power-hungry and the ruthless. Indeed, what this gripping tale of an attempted coup against the United States government manages to do is to remind us that, even in this age of international terrorism, the greatest threat may actually come from within.