Doomed repetition
Manchurian Candidate remake is well-made and well-acted and a little overcooked
FOLLOW THE SMILING HEAD Liev Schreiber plays a war hero and politician on the rise, but there’s more going on in his head than even he knows.
In a way, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate feels like a companion piece to Fahrenheit 9/11. As a political thriller set during a presidential election, it might seem a potentially explosive tale for an election-year release.
With the original story transposed from the era of Cold War McCarthyism to an approximation of our own times—specifically, after the Gulf War and vaguely in a near-future riddled with terrorist events—the Demme version echoes the post-9/11 situation without really confronting it in any direct, large-scale way. The 2004 Candidate has political conspiracies, corporate dominance, manipulated elections and troubled Gulf War vets, but its politics and its overall impact are somewhat diffuse in comparison with those of its predecessor.
Like the 1962 version, however, the Demme Candidate is more quirky political thriller than all-out social commentary, and therein lies its strongest appeal. Demme and his screenwriters have reconfigured several key aspects of the story, but the dramatic interest still revolves around three distinctly intriguing characters—a supposed war hero named Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), Shaw’s fanatical and politically powerful mother (Meryl Streep) and the army officer (Denzel Washington) who begins to investigate the terrifying dreams that he and other vets are having about Shaw’s exploits.
Streep is excellent as the suavely fiendish and manipulative mother (a part played memorably by Angela Lansbury in the first film version). And while both Washington and Schreiber have brilliant moments of offbeat behavior, both characterizations get somewhat blurred by plot complications and character shifts added to the 2004 version. The sharply focused and comparatively simple ironies of the first version give way here to multiple ambiguities that seem more perplexing than perceptive.
There is good work by a number of supporting players (most notably Jon Voight, Jeffrey Wright and Kimberly Elise), and a good many familiar faces are used to apposite ironic effect in very small parts (Ted Levine, Bruno Ganz, Dean Stockwell, Bill Irwin, Miguel Ferrer, Al Franken and Tracey Walter, among others).
That and a range of offbeat cameos (Roger Corman, Sidney Lumet, Walter Mosley and various writers and rappers) contribute nicely to the subversively humorous elements of déjà vu of Demme’s remake.
