Director:
Jonathan Demme
Starring:
Denzel Washington
Meryl Streep
Liev Schreiber
Jeffrey Wright
Kimberly Elise
Jon Voight
Ted Levine
Release: 30 Jul. 04
IMDb
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The Manchurian Candidate
BY: DAVID PERRY
Jonathan Demme, who did gangbusters remaking Charade two
years ago with The Truth About Charlie, evidently let the adulation go to
his head. Instead of following it up with another noble attempt at
commercial filmmaking, he chose to go with the decidedly ignoble: he remade
a part of the cinematic canon. Though not quite as reprehensible as remaking
Psycho, his decision to dance on top of John Frankenheimer somewhat fresh
grave by remaking the director’s masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate,
comes across as an especially arrogant thing to do. Whatever chances he had
at making an interesting film about the malleability of modern-day
politics were tossed to the wayside when he chose to take it straight
from George Axelrod’s screen adaptation of the Richard Condon novel.
Choosing to encircle Desert Storm and corrupt corporations now that the
communist threat of the original is out of style, this Manchurian Candidate
is more in-your-face than Frankenheimer’s vision. The broad strokes of
traditional thriller storytelling set beside truly original set pieces are
inverted by Demme’s need to lionize and villainize characters at key
moments and his hesitancy to let the actors do their own work. Only Meryl
Streep, channeling Angela Landsbury’s pitch-perfect antecedent, delivers any semblance of a multi-layered performance. Otherwise,
the screen is crowded with actors like Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber
gawking at the camera.
Furthermore, the whole work seems to exist in a 2008 campaign overwrought
with bipolar politicians unable to create clear, concise cases for
themselves that do not go against their previous statements. So intent is
Demme to make sure that no political party is implicated in the film, the
parties sound both Republican and Democratic talking points -- sometimes
they’re John Kerry before Howard Dean become the frontrunner, other times
they’re Kerry after the Dean rise. Like the breath of fresh air the Vermont
upstart was to that race, his cinematic equivalent, a Connecticut
progressive played by Jon Voight, is just as important and no less wasted.
I know that the easy way for people to discredit my opinion is to say that
I’m merely throwing sour grapes at a film I was destined to dislike because
they’re remaking a favorite. Perhaps there’s some truth to this -- I cannot
be sure -- but I do know that I at least wanted something new to come from
the remake, whether it be in the justification or the intensity of its
themes. This only film tinkers with the original's finale enough to turn it into a variation
on the Hollywood blockbuster conventions, losing everything in a bit of
inept genre boosting. The mentality that made this work so commanding in
1963 was built on the worries of a populace that even an implausible
thriller could turn out true. In 2004, the naïve mentality is gone, and all
that remains are the improbable elements.
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