It’s bad luck that Jonathan Demme’s well-made but dry-as-a-bone remake of this classic 1962 thriller was released the same year as Fahrenheit 9/11—our real-life president George Bush is much scarier than Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw, the vice-presidential hopeful and brainwashed sleeper of The Manchurian Candidate.
Timed to capitalize on election year disaffection (it opened in the U.S. the day after John Kerry's nomination), The Manchurian Candidate is respectably crafted and thoroughly appropriate these times. Cynically political and militantly anti-corporate, it pushes all the right buttons, but takes no risks, and therefore never approximates the paranoid intensity of John Frankenheimer’s original.
Screenwriters Dean Georgaris and Daniel Pyne were brought in to update George Axelrod’s screenplay for for the original film (itself adapted from Richard Condon’s 1959 novel). The changes are tidy enough—a sinister king-making corporation, the improbably-named Manchurian Global (standing in for the real-life villains of Moore’s film, Haliburton and Carlyle), has replaced the commies as the bad guy; the Gulf War stands in for the Korean Conflict; microchip technology has replaced behavioral conditioning as the preferred brainwashing technique of the villain de jour.
Yet somehow Demme fails to embue the film with the reckless, cold-sweat, conspiracy theorist anxiety that drove Frankenheimer’s film.
The film’s cast is excellent, including Jon Voight, Miguel Ferrer, Ted Levine, and Dean Stockwell. A braver production might have reversed the casting, with Schreiber playing Marco and Washington playing Shaw, but then again America is probably more ready to accept the idea of a brainwashed vice president than it is a black man on the verge of the White House. Denzel is dutifully sympathetic as the psychologically disintegrating Major Bennett Marco, and Schreiber gives an impressive nuanced performance as the idealistic sleeper Shaw, a man manipulated, not only by his own party and by morally bankrupt corporations, but by his own family as well.
Perhaps we shouldn’t blame the filmmakers if The Manchurian Candidate ultimately doesn’t live up to its predecessor. Although Demme makes a valiant attempt to reinvent the mood of the original film, he somehow never finds the means. Maybe Demme has just made a mediocre film—maybe that’s it. And yet, even so, you have to ask yourself, why is it that the idea of a brainwashed corporate pawn in Whitehouse no longer shocks or frightens? See you at the polls, America.
Matt Parks (8.28.04)
