DREAM OR NIGHTMARE? Liev Schreiber and Denzel Washington pose the big questions.
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Like many disappointing Jonathan Demme films, The Manchurian Candidate at times seems poised to rise to the level of genius. Such as when Demme cuts from the throbbing interior of a Bradley fighting vehicle in which soldiers are playing poker with hip-hop music on at full volume to a long shot of the sky above the Kuwaiti desert, black and orange from the burning oil wells of the Gulf War. Or when he pans the apartment walls of vet Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright) 13 years later, making almost palpable the squalid palimpsest of newspaper clippings, brutal drawings, and scrawled, repeated phrases. Mostly, though, the potential for genius here lies in the performance of Denzel Washington as Major Ben Marco, Melvin’s commanding officer and a basket case who might be on to a plot to take over the country or who might be nuts, he doesn’t know which, or even whether there’s any difference. When he tells his only confidant, Delp (the great Bruno Ganz, playing a hobbit), that his nightmares of his experiences in Kuwait in 1991 seem more realistic than his memories, he’s told, unhelpfully, that maybe he’s still in Kuwait and what’s happening now is the nightmare. Something about the way Washington crumples into his trenchcoat and squints behind his band-aided spectacles suggests that there might be something to that possibility. Then again, maybe it’s all just a movie, a remake no less, a pastiche of bits and pieces that are smart and dumb but mostly derivative. Demme showed gumption in updating John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece of perennial paranoia, but the comparisons will be invidious nonetheless. As in the original, Marco commands a scouting patrol; in this case he’s doing reconnaissance in advance of Desert Storm. There’s an ambush, and in the official version of what happened, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) saves all but two members of the unit, an act of heroism for which he wins the Congressional Medal of Honor. Much to the delight of his mother, Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep, combining Martha Stewart with Medea), who uses the award to propel him into politics. And now, in this fictitious present day or near future, he’s poised for the vice-presidency. But Marco and Melvin have a dream, one that’s far less horrifying than the sight of Shaw’s beloved costumed as the Queen of Diamonds. (Frankenheimer created his nightmare with the perverse elegance of a single 360-degree pan.) The patrol members have been captured and their brains not so much washed as roto-rootered. Demme, the master of horror in The Silence of the Lambs, throws in Grand Guignol experiments and drilled skulls, but these aren’t nearly as scary as Frankenheimer’s dowager lecturing about hydrangeas in a hotel lobby. Neither is the plot that gets uncovered particularly shocking given what we’ve been through from the Kennedy assassinations to September 11. And these days, there’s no Iron Curtain to project our dread on. Back then, Manchuria evoked the Evil Empire, but in this post–Cold War era, movies have been hard pressed to come up with adequate bad guys this side of al-Qaeda. What if the enemy is us? In other words, corporations like Halliburton, or Viacom, corporate parent of Paramount, which released The Manchurian Candidate. Let’s have a corporation named Manchurian Global try to take over the world! Maybe audiences won’t notice that corporations already have taken over the world, that capitalism has defeated communism, that we’re all either consumers or the consumed. At its wittiest and most subversive, The Manchurian Candidate lampoons this post-Orwellian image of the world. At times, the barbs are obvious, as when Senator Shaw schmoozes with her Manchurian Global backers in a cloud of cigar smoke and cynicism. More telling is the background chatter of the media — overheard or just-glimpsed bulletins about the latest pre-emptive strike against Guinea or Guatemala and the need for "compassionate vigilance." Paul Verhoeven perfected this parodic technique in RoboCop and Starship Troopers, films that seem prophetic today. Demme’s Candidate is neither prophetic nor very parodic. It’s like the mutterings of a talented filmmaker half in a dream.
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