Summer Camp
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s less a remake of director John Frankenheimer’s 1962 original, about a brainwashed assassin out to make his mommy’s husband president, than a reconceptualization in which the bad guys are both the politicians using fear to manipulate voters and the multinationals that use politicians to control the government.
As Demme’s version opens, Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington, in the Frank Sinatra role) is leading his platoon into Kuwait on a routine mission during the first Gulf War. Among his soldiers is Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), the aloof son of a powerful conservative senator played by Meryl Streep. In eerie dream sequences that become grotesque flashbacks, we learn that the squad is ambushed and taken to a faraway base on a remote island, where men in white overcoats treat the soldiers to the Clockwork Orange special. Their brains are implanted with mind-control devices that make them do horrible things to their own comrades.
When they return to the States, Shaw is a war hero, given the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving his squad during the ambush. But Marco has become a total disaster, living on nothing but Ramen noodles and No Doz, keeping his glasses together with masking tape and finding no one in the Army who will believe his story. Unlike Sinatra’s more heroic Marco, Washington’s has no allies. Demme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris have made Marco a desperate lunatic; we’re not even sure we can trust Marco’s memories of what happened during the war.
Schreiber’s Shaw, a rising but oddly unambitious star, is a different brand of weirdo — more likable than Marco, maybe, but still checked out from the neck up. Shaw is a liberal junior senator whom his mother, Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, has bullied onto his party’s ticket as the vice-presidential candidate. Streep brings a whole new layer of creepy to the original’s Angela Lansbury role, vamping her way into near-camp.
The Commies of the original are long gone; Shaw is now the pawn of Manchurian Global, a corporation that employs Evil Scientists to genetically modify fruit and turn grown men into mind-controlled vegetables. When Shaw’s switch is flipped, the man who espouses “compassionate vigilance” will become someone for whom civil liberties are a thing of the distant past.
Demme tweaks the original just enough to make this Manchurian Candidate feel original. With its oddball cast, including Al Franken as a TV journalist, singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock as a corporate baddie and Roger Corman as a politician, you might mistake it for one big goof, a knowing smirk that grows into a real giggle. But his retelling makes it as much a spiritual sequel to Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View as a remake of Frankenheimer’s movie. Demme’s movie has no right to work, but it does, and then some.
