Paranoia Strikes Deep

Photo by Ken Regan

I’ve spent the last few months dreading The Manchurian Candidate, Jonathan Demme’s remake of the outrageous political satire that was shunned by audiences back in 1962 but has been celebrated by critics ever since. John Frankenheimer’s original was one of the most bracingly inventive American movies of the last 50 years, a witches’ brew of Cold War paranoia, Freudian camp, hipster absurdism and a nihilism so subversive that it spooked even the film’s star, Frank Sinatra, who helped keep it in the vault for nearly a quarter-century following its initial release. It would be impossible to recapture such far-out audacity, and Demme wisely doesn’t try.

The new movie takes place in an exaggerated version of today’s security-mad America, with suicide bombs blasting Denver and corporations pulling the puppet strings of political life. If that weren’t scary enough, Army Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) is caught in an even more terrifying nightmare. In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, he and his Army recon team got ambushed by the Iraqis and were saved by the derring-do of one Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), who guided them through enemy territory to safety. Or so Marco remembers. But can he trust his memory? Or did somebody brainwash his unit back in Kuwait?

To keep from completely losing it, Major Marco begins dogging Shaw, now a robotically liberal vice-presidential candidate pushed forward by his overbearing mother, conservative Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep). Marco’s pursuit of Shaw plunges him into the phantasmagoric whorls of a conspiracy populated by a perky-mysterious supermarket clerk (the fine Kimberly Elise), a peacenik senator (Jon Voight, not acting loony for once) and a scientist pal, played by Bruno Ganz, who resembles an old toad happy to have been brought up, croaking, from the bottom of some dank, ancient well. Meanwhile, lurking in the background is the enigmatic business concern Manchurian Global — whose closest political ally is Eleanor Prentiss Shaw.

Although dulled by a soft-minded epilogue, The Manchurian Candidate marks a splendid return to form for Demme, a filmmaker I’ve rooted for ever since the 1970s, when idiosyncratic pictures like Handle With Care, Melvin and Howard and Something Wild held the fort of personal filmmaking against the invasion of infantile blockbusterism that made the 1980s the worst movie decade in American history. He was apparently knocked off balance by the success of that 1991 juggernaut The Silence of the Lambs, and followed it up with a pair of unimportant Big Important Films. While Philadelphia was distressingly conventional (it proved that gay people are human, too), the 1998 Oprah Winfrey vehicle Beloved took scads of chances but was crushingly dull — shocking from a director who’d cut his teeth making movies like Caged Heat and Crazy Mama. By the time Demme reached The Truth About Charlie, his 2002 remake of another ’60s touchstone, you heard people whispering that maybe he’d lost his chops. But for all that film’s faults, Demme wasn’t really trying to redo Stanley Donen’s Charade. He was trying to rethink it, give it a whole new spirit. Which is precisely what he pulls off in The Manchurian Candidate.

 

Frankenheimer’s original movie was based on a 1959 best-seller by the late Richard Condon, a vivid pop novelist who wore his cynicism as jauntily as Sinatra did his fedora. Steeped in the anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s, Condon’s novel both tapped into and sent up the Cold War hysterias of both left and right. The book was crazy-clever, and in adapting it, screenwriter George Axelrod (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Lord Love a Duck) added whole new dimensions of lunacy. While Demme’s version (written by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris) preserves the story’s original arc, it plays things much straighter — it’s more thriller than send-up. Demme makes no attempt to mimic Frankenheimer’s gaudy, Wellesian imagery or capture the hallucinatory wit of the original garden-party brainwashing scene. This Manchurian Candidate is consciously modeled on the Cinema of Paranoia spawned by the Nixon years, including The Parallax View, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor and William Richert’s Winter Kills (an underrated personal favorite, also based on a novel by Condon). Demme and photographer Tak Fujimoto ratchet up the sense of uncertainty and dread with looming close-ups of characters facing the camera as potentially sinister figures enter the background. We share Major Marco’s edgy disorientation, a feeling captured by the movie’s slyly ambiguous tagline: “Everything is under control.”

The question, of course, is who’s controlling whom? Without spoiling things, I can tell you that this new Manchurian Candidate portrays a corporatized America dominated by companies like Big-Mart, a chain that takes in trillions each quarter; a touch-screen voting company analogous to the real-life company Diebold; and, above all, Manchurian Global, which comes off as an unholy hybrid of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group. In such a world, politics is mere shadow play. It doesn’t matter which party Raymond Shaw or his mother belongs to — Manchurian Global is a contributor to both.