Oh, what a tangled web we weave when a studio green-lights a classic's reprise.
Such hindsight routinely dogs remakes, most of which are barking disasters. But The Manchurian Candidate purrs like a sated tiger after a hearty meal.
What are the similarities between the legendary 1962 version and this modern makeover, beyond Frank Sinatra headlining the former and daughter Tina co-producing the latter? Given the updated setting, fresh enemies, reinterpreted characters, reshuffled plot lines, altered motivations and overhauled ideology, they're nearly nonexistent. Nearly.
While both speak potently to their eras' political fears, the more satirical original managed a pitch-black humor that mocked and mitigated the cataclysmic paranoia over communist infiltrators and the so-called Red Menace (see sidebar review). The more straight-faced remake—a fictional bookend to Fahrenheit 9/11 in these strident, polarized days, though no political party is identified—similarly revolves around a seemingly preposterous premise, but addresses it with unswerving gravity. Paranoia isn't paranoia, it tell us, if something wicked this way comes for real.
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Before Fail-Safe nailed Cold War terror dramatically and Dr. Strangelove captured it comically, The Manchurian Candidate scored a twofer, wrapping a tense thriller around a wicked satire, both powered by Red-Scare paranoia. Manchurian taunts and tickles anew as a time-capsule from when folks suspected their neighbor might be Commie Dearest. Director John Frakenheimer sustains suspense with a straightforward narrative revealing the brainwashing early—it's even more outlandish for its poker-faced unfolding—then winks at it. After capture by Chinese communists during the Korean War, a platoon is brainwashed, and aloof, unlikable Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is programmed as an assassin and returned to the States as a supposed war hero. But Maj. Marko (Frank Sinatra) suspects a plot after suffering intense nightmares. Frankenheimer has great fun with sly details: the liberal senator who "bleeds" milk after he's shot; the Lincoln images behind the braying, McCarthy-like senator; the chillingly cheery brainwasher; and the brilliant, black-humored staging of the process, intercutting communist officials with the soldiers' illusion—ladies from a New Jersey garden club. And savor Angela Lansbury as the mother of all movie bitches. Candidate's a landslide winner.
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Overtly, this Candidate serves up its nightmare scenario of a plot to install a corporately controlled U.S. vice president via rigged politics and push-button assaassinations as an urgent cautionary tale in the Age of Enron, big-biz suits being the bogeymen du jour. Here it's "Manchurian Global." Covertly (just barely), it claims it's already happened—witness Cheney/Halliburton, and those MoveOn.org ads that frame the Bush-Kerry contest as "the corporations' choice or the people's choice?"—and simply sprinkles it with techno-trimmings like drilling holes in skulls and inserting computer chips. Thus is a partisan political pill (Al Franken and a host of left-wing mouthpieces play correspondents) transformed into pulsing movie thrills. And Candidate conveniently opens on the heels of the Democratic convention.
If Michael Moore gave Republicans a throbbing headache, director Jonathan Demme ratchets it up to a migraine. A damned entertaining one. Credit strong performances, especially from Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. Washington's on familiar footing in a film overlapping two other Denzel flicks: the Gulf War angle of Courage Under Fire and the presidential-thriller machinations of The Pelican Brief.
Officially based on Richard Condon's novel and George Axelrod's original screenplay—"subconsciously suggested by" is more like it, given the radical rewrites—screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris' complex take transplants the action trigger from the Korean conflict to the first Gulf War and has Washington in Sinatra's role of Capt. Bennett Marco, who's haunted by nightmares stemming from his unit's desert ambush.
Back home, Marco is making motivational speeches heralding the heroics of Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), the Medal-of-Honor winner for saving the lives of the men in Marco's platoon. But Marco's dark dreams, suffused with terrifying images of torture and brainwashing, begin calling those events into question. That sends Marco in search of answers, and of the cold, distant Shaw, whom ex-platoon mates robotically describe as "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known."
Shaw is now a congressman whose manipulative momma, a combative, emasculating senator (Streep) with a tad more than matronly interest, fashions her son's supposed valor into a vice-presidential bid she'll see through no matter the cost—or Marco's increasing suspicions and intrusive investigation. Obviously, matters are more sinister than they seem.
Working from a script with clever hairpin turns, Demme crafts a riveting jigsaw thriller steadily pieced into a terrifying whole. He teases us with glimpses of information, giving us just enough time to turn them over in our minds before he further complicates the puzzle with encounters ranging from ordinary to surreal to physically uncomfortable. Demme understands, and exploits, the media's politics-as-entertainment ethos, which treats our democratic process as high drama—a game with teams to be cheered and jeered. Though it begs credulity in these days of pre-planned party "celebrations" to suggest heading off a floor fight for the veep nomination as a character's motive, it still pays off handsomely in a rousingly staged, and shocking, convention climax.
Washington, abandoning his trademark understated swagger, is effective as Marco veers from mentally fragile to dangerously unhinged, and Schreiber's Shaw, though less nuanced than the original's Laurence Harvey, is a believably conflicted pawn. Jon Voight does yeoman work as the liberal senator challenging the younger Shaw for the veep nod and triggering Momma Shaw's wrath. And Kimberly Elise plays a supermarket cashier who cozies up to Marco, in a role marvelously expanded and crucial to the plot, compared to Janet Leigh's throwaway part in the original.
Then there's Meryl, having a scenery-devouring blast as the ball-busting predator in a pantsuit, at least equaling Angela Lansbury's memorable man-eater from '62. And though the Hillaryesqe echoes are evident, no reasonably sane Democrat could diss this ideologically simpatico slice of celluloid propaganda. Which also is a tasty popcorn thriller for the entire moviegoing electorate.