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The
Manchurian Candidate
 
For those of us who only vaguely remember the original Manchurian
Candidate, which starred Frank
Sinatra and Angela
Lansbury, pretending to be cult film buffs and fretting over
whether or not the new release pales in
comparison to the acknowledged genius of the original didn't seem like time well
spent. We do remember liking
John Frankenheimer's
1962 effort when we rented it so long ago but
have to admit that we would be hard pressed to recall anything of the exact
storyline other than that the Chinese were behind some political
nefariousness and there was a cool scene where Sinatra keeps saying "Poor
Poor Raymond" over and over. And we never read the book by Richard Condon so
we didn't have to worry about it not living up to it's literary
counterpart either. As a result of all this we were looking forward to
the Denzel Washington
and Meryl Streep
version directed by Jonathan
Demme.
We weren't disappointed.
The 2004 edition of the film kicks off with a platoon in the first Gulf war and the ambush
that ensues when they head into Iraq on a re-con mission. The firefight scenes
are frenetically shot and frustrating to watch but you quickly learn that
they were filmed that way to make it deliberately unclear as to what exactly is
shaking out in the battle.
As it
turns out, the fact that we are left guessing as to whether any of
it was real anyway, was all just a dream, or some sort of manufactured memory, is one of
the central points of the film. In any event, we quickly fast forward to
modern times where it seems that Denzel and some of the other surviving soldiers
of the "lost company" are
having trouble leading normal lives in the aftermath of their
experiences. One of the soldiers that was involved of course
is Raymond Shaw, the decorated hero of the ambush, who is now on the
fast track to becoming Vice President of the United States at the
behest of his mover and shaker (and Senator) mother Ellie played by
an eerily Hillaryesque Streep (pictured).
Another is Ben Marco played by Washington who appears a good career marine but has
been soldiering on through a military life since the ordeal trying not to succumb to his dreams by staying awake all the time
and ingesting prodigious amounts of noodle soup.
When he runs across yet another member of the platoon who tells him
that he has also been having nightmares, Denzel begins looking into things and slowly comes
to realize that he has been a puppet at the hands of an unseen
puppeteer. As he struggles to break free of the strings, he realizes
that the forces that control him are very well connected and as he
battles to overcome them against the backdrop of a presidential
election involving his ex-platoon mate Shaw, Washington finds that
he will be more involved in the course of US political history than he could have
ever imagined.
 
As far as summer entertainment goes, this film is pretty good. It is
well directed and the acting is solid with Washington's performance
standing a cut above the other strong efforts as he plays Marco with
a gritty, determined and damaged air. Demme's choices of
odd and often intrusive camera angles, panning shots, and sudden cut aways keep
your attention and add to the sort of surreal atmosphere that the
characters are often facing. If you are not familiar with the plot,
the story will keep you guessing until the end when it all sorts
itself out in a way that doesn't disappoint. The eerie similarities between the current
political state and the film's convention and campaigns are well
timed of course and the rhetoric that pours from the candidates
mouths in the movie is so well done that you wonder why the
screenwriters don't move over and work in the political realm
themselves. Let's hope that the fact that Liev
Schreiber (left), who plays Raymond and looks quite a bit like John
Edwards (right), is not evidence of further dirty tricks at the
hands of the Republicans trying to use the film to suggest to swing state
voters on some subliminal level that a vote for the Kerry ticket is
a vote for further loss of personal freedoms and ultimately their own
doom at the hands of some unseen Megacorp that actually will be
running everything. Especially when, in fact, the opposite is more
likely the case.
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