A Serviceable "Candidate"

So why remake it? Like most head-scratching questions to emerge out of Hollywood, this is one time and time again every critic finds themselves asking when filmmakers decide to redo an already (near)perfect movie. Most of the time, it just doesn’t make sense (“Casablanca” into “Cabo Blanco?” “Charade” into “The Truth About Charlie?” I don’t think so), yet studio heads insist on doing it again and again.

Now we have a modern-day retelling of Richard Condon’s Communist-era polemic. Trading Korean commies for Enron and Haliburton-esque corporate bigwigs, director Jonathan Demme and writers Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris have lithely updated the Cold War classic and generate skillful scares playing upon our worst fears in these uncertain times. And while it doesn’t resonate as fully or come to the same chilling conclusion as John Frankenheimer’s film, Demme’s version is still a surprisingly unnerving thriller that’s a stronger indictment of modern political realities than even Michael Moore’s anti-Bush rant “Fahrenheit 9/11.” And if it doesn’t quite come together like it appears it is going to early on, it’s still a much better attempt at remake than one could have possibly hoped for.

This time around, two-time Oscar-winner Denzel Washington takes over the Frank Sinatra role as the unbalanced Ben Marco. A seasoned military veteran, Marco can’t shake a recurring nightmare revolving around a particularly vicious moonlight firefight involving his unit in the sand dunes of Kuwait. It was there that Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) showed his merit, single-handedly saving Marco and his men from certain death. For that, the wealthy son of a career politician received the Medal of Honor immediately launching him into the political stratosphere.

But did he really save the unit? After running into one of his men, Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright, whose character was pivotal in the first film and is reduced to an afterthought this time around), after a speech Marco isn’t too sure. Nightmares of kidnapping, torture, murder and brainwashing keep him up at night, and even if these incomplete mental specters are only partially true than the only thing scarier then the lies bringing Shaw to the Vice Presidency are those that crafted them for public consumption in the first place.

It’s best not to talk too much about what goes on in “The Manchurian Candidate,” especially for those unfamiliar with the original or Condon’s novel. Needless to say, there is a conspiracy, and it stretches into the highest echelons of power tainting even the most unlikely sources. Is Shaw’s mother, fellow Senator Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep), more than just a shrill harpy looking out for her son’s best interests? Can Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight), unceremoniously dumped from the Presidential Ticket to make room for the young war hero, be pulling Machiavellian harp strings from behind the scenes? Or what about the multinational Manchurian Corporation – is there interest in Shaw more than just a passing fancy?

No secret, really, to the answer to that last question. This company is out to buy the Presidency, but with a young man’s brain cells substituting for their pocketbook. Something awful did happen in the deserts of Kuwait, and their repercussions could very well shatter, not only the lives of Marco and Shaw, but those of every man, woman and child living in America.

The look of the picture is just splendid. Technically, this is Demme at his best. Not since “Silence of the Lambs” has the director managed to move so many different pieces so dexterously. The director’s longtime cinematographer Tak Fujimoto is at the top of his game, doing things here with his camera that are simply sublime. While editors Carol Littleton and Craig McKay move back and forth in time and memory with spellbinding ease, there use of montage and jump cuts so effective I found myself almost as unbalanced as the protagonist.

It goes without saying that the acting is stellar. Washington is galvanizing, and his scenes with both Schreiber and Wright have poignancy and a nervous energy that makes the skin crawl. Voight brings a quiet dignity to his too-brief scenes, while Streep takes on Lansbury’s Academy Award-winning role with a savage barbarity we haven’t seen from the actress in ages. She digs her teeth so far into the picture I could almost feel the blood dripping down my arm, the actress shredding everything and everyone that gets in her way with carnal relish bordering on the masochistic.

But as good as the performers all are – a scene in a conference room between Marco and Shaw just past the one-third mark is a stunning display of raw visceral acting talent – there is still something missing. Gone is the edge, the pointed brilliance of the original. While scary on a superficial level, the filmmakers never dive deeper, and while there is nothing wrong in the slightest with crafting an elegantly entertaining thriller I couldn’t help but want more. What’s Demme’s point? Big corporations are bad? Politicians can be dangerous? Anyone watching the world right now knows this to be true even with the tabloid-nausea passing for news on the major network. It’s nothing we don’t know, and the director and his writers don’t know how to do more with it than just be redundant.