July 29-August 4, 2004

movies

Running Still

POLITICAL CONVENTION: Denzel Washington in the punch-pulling Candidate.

The Manchurian Candidate falls victim to the Hollywood conspiracy.

by Cindy Fuchs

Military operations, media hype, corporate finagling, presidential politics. It sounds like last night's news. But it's also The Manchurian Candidate, then and now. In 1962, it was John Frankenheimer and George Axelrod's brilliant breakdown of Cold War paranoia, drawn from Richard Condon's novel. Now Jonathan Demme revisits the idea that American politics isn't transparent or democratic, but nefarious, corrupt and managed by outside forces. Then, it was communists. Now it's corporations.

Like the original, the new film begins with a war. In the confusion of 1991's Gulf War, Army Capt. Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) leads his men into an ambush, burning oil wells and night-vision battling visible under Wyclef's rueful cover of John Fogerty's "Fortunate Son." As it turns out, the only soldier who might be deemed fortunate, however briefly, is Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber). Following three unremembered days in captivity, the survivors emerge, believing Raymond to be their savior and recommending he receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Some 13 years later, Marco, now a major, remembers only slender fragments of those three days, yet dutifully rehearses them for sparsely attended assemblies, insisting repeatedly on Raymond's heroism, generosity and kindness. Following one such appearance, he's accosted by a survivor of their Desert Storm ordeal, Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright), broken and increasingly frightened by his recurring nightmare, in which Raymond murders another of the American captives: "I'm just a little stuck, sir," he mutters. Al's notebooks, filled with monstrous images and chicken-scratch jottings, aggravate Marco's own doubts concerning what happened in Kuwait and its discomfiting relation to his mantra, that Raymond Shaw is "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most selfless man I've ever met in my life."

So far, so like the original. The changes begin with Marco's relationship to Al. Two black men in a mostly white military unit, they share a certain trust and loyalty. Though plainly upsetting, their meeting moves Marco to follow up on his own misgivings, and not through the military, whom he distrusts, and vice versa (unlike Frank Sinatra's Marco, who was able to confide in and work for his Army).

Washington's Marco fulfills his career obligations, but he lives in fear and shadows. The movie provides him with a convenient partner in conspiracy-theorizing, a "rogue scientist" named Delp (Bruno Ganz), who confirms Marco's suspicion that he and the "famed lost patrol" were brainwashed in 1991. (The literal-minded mechanics of the process are less ambiguous and considerably less satisfying than Frankenheimer's garden-club hallucinations.)

No longer a newspaperman (the press is in cahoots with the political system now), Raymond is transformed into a senator running for vice president, thanks to the behind-the-scenes manipulations of his charismatic mother, Sen. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), of the "fabled Prentiss family." Her entrance into the movie's male-dominated political argument is frankly dazzling, as she persuades skeptical party operatives to put her son's name forward, rather than their agreed-upon, safer candidate, selling Raymond as a good-looking means to "Secure Tomorrow," per politicized and media-exacerbated post-9/11 anxieties.

Embodying such anxieties is the new movie's villain, a corporation called Manchurian Global. This shift constitutes a necessary and mostly clever twist on the earlier Chinese and Russian communist plot by screenwriters Daniel Pyne (The Sum of All Fears) and Dean Georgaris (Paycheck), in that power is invested in corporations rather than foreign nations. The threat in 2004 is so insidious and entrenched that even its exposure has little effect. (Even so, Demme's movie offers up a happy ending relative to 1962's dire finish, which probably says as much about marketing strategies as it does about resilient optimism.) With a stake in all aspects of national security, media production, war-making and nation-building, Manchurian Global — represented vaguely by executive types as well as a wholly malevolent white South African doctor (Simon McBurney) — is deadly serious about protecting its interests.

Still, the film draws a line between corporations and government, sustaining a hope that the system might be salvaged by an honestly free election. For Marco, this hope is incarnated by Rosie (a fiercely convincing Kimberly Elise), a grocery clerk who looks after him as he sweats through nightmares and pursues his quest to expose some sort of truth. Though their initial dialogue on the train from D.C. to New York preserves a bit of the original Janet Leigh-Sinatra exchange, it loses its delirious weirdness and intriguing abstraction.

The same might be said for most of The Manchurian Candidate, which trades peculiarity and insinuation for assertion and argument. If political parties aren't identified, the players' (and the film's) affiliations are clear enough, from Eleanor's fear-baiting rhetoric to the flawed liberalism of her archenemy Sen. Tom Jordan (Jon Voight). This loss of subtlety and strangeness speaks to a changed political and commercial context, a simplified mode of thought, that is more distressing than any movie-style paranoia.

The Manchurian Candidate Directed by Jonathan Demme A Paramount release Opens Friday at area theaters