December 23-29, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

The Manchurian Candidate ($29.99 DVD)/Spartan ($19.96 DVD) Comforting as the idea might be that right-wing theocracy would give artistic radicalism a shot in the arm, the election year mainly gave left-wing filmmakers the opportunity to demonstrate their irrelevance. Remaking The Manchurian Candidate was a bad idea from the start, compounded by a misguided update that shifted the blame from Chinese communism to a faceless global conglomerate named Manchurian Global. Paranoid thrillers don't work unless they strain the edges of belief, and the remade Manchurian's conspiracy theories had already been rendered prosaic by the documentary The Corporation: Why assassinate a candidate when you can copyright his DNA?

Only David Mamet's Spartan pushed the boundaries of paranoia, though not many noticed its brief run. Perhaps the timing was off: Spartan was released in March, just as the Abu Ghraib scandal was gathering steam, while by Candidate's July opening, the mess in Iraq had become too obvious to ignore. There's no question that Spartan was dumped on the market, while Candidate was heralded by magazine covers and movie-star profiles. Not surprising that Spartan got the bum's rush, since the movie's handheld camera, knife-edge lighting and contortionist plot stirred up a sense of genuine dread. (For all its newfangled flash, Jonathan Demme's Candidate was practically comforting in its Vietnam-era anti-corporatism.) From House of Games through The Spanish Prisoner and Heist, Mamet has delighted in constructing capers full of switchbacks and double-crosses, but Spartan's hairpin turns are drained of roller-coaster thrills. As a CIA black-ops specialist searching for the president's kidnapped daughter, Val Kilmer has barely unraveled one mystery when the bottom drops out again; the deceptions are potentially endless.

The loneliest soldier since First Blood's John Rambo, Kilmer's nameless, homeless spook is a cold-hearted pragmatist. When Tix Texada's eager recruit tells him she's teaching knife fighting, Kilmer shoots back, "You teach 'em to kill. That way, they meet some son of a bitch studied knife fighting, they send his soul to hell." That's the rough reality of homeland security in a nutshell, and a terrifying calculation of its moral cost. Studded with Mamet's pugilist dialogue -- the only aspect of his craft most critics can recognize, as if Mamet were still a playwright who only recently graduated to filmmaking -- Spartan is a taut, soul-bearing work whose ultimate conspiracy is the "war on terror" itself, a war not for oil or ideology, but power, pure and simple. Sleep on that.