Updated 'Candidate' is a winner'Manchurian Candidate' gets a winning update
Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) hasn't been faring well. An Army officer who saw action in the Gulf War, Marco is living on a diet of instant noodles and No-Doz in a debris-strewn Washington apartment. He's haunted by recurring nightmares. He thinks someone's been messing with his head. In Jonathan Demme's satisfyingly sinister update of The Manchurian Candidate, political intrigue and paranoia are fused. Where director John Frankenheimer's 1962 adaptation of the Richard Condon thriller used the Cold War as the backdrop for a wild tale of brainwashing, assassination and a presidential coup, Demme's version - scripted by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris - pins the conspiracy on a new foe: corporate evildoers.
Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) hasn't been faring well. An Army officer who saw action in the Gulf War, Marco is living on a diet of instant noodles and No-Doz in a debris-strewn Washington apartment. He's haunted by recurring nightmares. He thinks someone's been messing with his head.
In Jonathan Demme's satisfyingly sinister update of The Manchurian Candidate, political intrigue and paranoia are fused. Where director John Frankenheimer's 1962 adaptation of the Richard Condon thriller used the Cold War as the backdrop for a wild tale of brainwashing, assassination and a presidential coup, Demme's version - scripted by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris - pins the conspiracy on a new foe: corporate evildoers.
The "Manchurian" in the title no longer refers to Chinese Communists but to Manchurian Global, a giant Haliburton-like concern with a serious military-industrial complex. Marco - the role played by Frank Sinatra in the original, and by a fiercely convincing Washington here - is a man battling for his sanity. He and the other survivors of his platoon's 1991 ambush in Kuwait vividly recall the heroic acts of Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), now a rising star in Congress. But in Marco's dreams, the memories of that nighttime desert firefight become something else: a Kafkaesque vision of mind control, manipulation and murder.
Is he losing his marbles, or is there something going on? Sure, Marco's paranoid, but that doesn't mean people aren't out to get him. Or does it?
With this week's Democratic Party lovefest kicking the presidential campaign into high gear, the backroom wheeling and dealing depicted in The Manchurian Candidate - and its rousing presidential convention - feel particularly resonant. (Although Demme's left-leaning politics are evident in his casting of Al Franken as a network news reporter, the pic strikes a pretty balanced position, with political zealots on both sides of the fence getting skewered.)
Meryl Streep, in the part played with drip-dry irony by Angela Lansbury in the Frankenheimer film, brings more than a dash of Hillary Clinton to her portrait of Eleanor Shaw, a high-powered senator lobbying for her son, the war hero, to get on the ticket as vice president. (There's a difference 40 years and the women's movement make: The character is now a senator, not a senator's wife.) Streep is a blast as the cajoling matriarch, counseling her son with a suffocating mix of steely despotism and creepily incestuous adulation.
And Schreiber, in the part first assayed by Laurence Harvey, brings subtle, spooky shadings to his turn as an idealistic young congressman compromised by powers beyond his control - and controlling him. Jon Voight (a respected senator), Jeffrey Wright (a freaked-out vet), and Kimberly Elise (a supermarket checkout girl with an eye for Marco) are among the interesting assorted players rounding out the cast.
Demme, whose wobbly 2002 flop, The Truth About Charlie, was a remake of another classic, Charade, regains his footing in this tightly constructed suspenser. His picture shares more than a few things, thematically and structurally, with his Oscar-winning hit The Silence of the Lambs. And Demme gets a taut, terrific performance out of Washington, his Philadelphia star.
Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.
Contact movie critic Steven Rea
at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.
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The Manchurian Candidate
*** (out of four stars)
Produced by Tina Sinatra, Scott Rudin, Jonathan Demme and Ilona Herzberg, directed by Demme, written by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, photography by Tak Fujimoto, music by Rachel Portman featuring Wyclef Jean, distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Running time: 2 hours, 6 mins.
Ben Marco. . . Denzel Washington
Raymond Shaw. . . Liev Schreiber
Eleanor Shaw. . . Meryl Streep
Thomas Jordan. . . Jon Voight
Rosie. . . Kimberly Elise
Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, adult themes)
Playing at: area theaters