Aim and fire
The Manchurian Candidate remake's political sniping is expertly timed.

By Cheryl Eddy

IT'S NOT THE Dick Cheney Story, but it might as well be: a twisted yarn involving a vice presidential candidate more intent on serving an ominous, excessively wealthy corporation than he is the blissfully ignorant Americans who've elected him. Jonathan Demme, director of the Manchurian Candidate remake, must be delighted by the success of Fahrenheit 9/11 – it's the perfect companion piece to this timely political thriller, a work of fiction that at this very moment feels like it could actually happen.

John Frankenheimer's 1962 take on Richard Condon's novel also eerily echoed then-current events, following the post-Korean War misfortunes of a hero soldier named Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) brainwashed by the enemy to kill on command. A half step behind is Shaw's former superior, Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), brainwashed to forget he witnessed the training of an assassin. The cold war holds the government in its icy grasp, with politicians like Shaw's right-wing stepfather, Sen. Johnny Iselin (James Gregory), spotting communists behind every desk in Washington, D.C. Shaw's insidious mother (Angela Lansbury) controls everything from behind the scenes: her son's life and soul, her husband's career, and, as it turns out, the future of the free world. The next year, after John F. Kennedy was murdered by a loner with stellar aim, a murky military past, and suspicious Russian connections, The Manchurian Candidate – a financial flop – went back into the vault, not to emerge again until the late 1980s.

That the original film is now considered a classic is a mixed blessing for Demme, whose recent reworking of Charade (retitled The Truth about Charlie) was a bust; there's also the matter of Lansbury crabbing her thoughts on the remake to Entertainment Weekly. Still, the global climate has changed a lot since the early 1960s, and unlike, say, Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate is the kind of film that lends itself to creative reassemblage. The bare bones of the story – mind control, political intrigue, the crazed pursuit of power – resonate more strongly now than perhaps they ever have.

Of course, Demme – working from Condon's novel and the original George Axelrod screenplay, as well as a new script by Daniel Pyne (The Sum of All Fears) and Dean Georgaris (Paycheck) – is aware a contemporary audience requires more than Sinatra's karate skills or Lansbury's chilling Mommie Dearest turn to keep them scarfing popcorn. Demme's Manchurian Candidate cranks up the volume, literally (Wyclef Jean wails a cover of the appropriately chosen "Fortunate Son" over the opening credits) and visually, offering up a film densely crowded with layers of sounds, images, graphics, and red-white-and-blue accents cribbed straight from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. A fictional cable news network infiltrates nearly every frame, providing the kind of exposition we'd never get from the film's tight-lipped characters; it also serves a more subversive function, streaming so much information that the bulk of it is delivered in near subliminal form. What's more, the film is dominated by extreme close-ups, lending even casual conversations a certain urgent intensity.

Fortunately, the faces we see so closely are up to the task; Demme, like Frankenheimer before him, has an ideal cast. Denzel Washington's Marco is far more troubled than Sinatra's ever was, palpably conveying the downward spiral of a man who's been barely keeping it together since returning from his Gulf War service. While in Kuwait, Marco and his men were ambushed; two soldiers died, but the rest were bravely saved by Shaw (Liev Schreiber), later awarded a Medal of Honor for his heroism. At least, that's how Marco thinks he remembers it; a rash of troubling dreams – hinting at experiences far more gruesome than the phony garden party staged in Frankenheimer's version – suggest horribly otherwise. A strange encounter with another former soldier (a twitchy Jeffrey Wright), followed by a visit to the man's creepy apartment (one of several elements that wouldn't be out of place in the film that won Demme an Oscar, The Silence of the Lambs), convinces Marco he's experiencing something far beyond Gulf War Syndrome.

Meanwhile, Shaw has been elected to Congress; his fervently patriotic mother (Meryl Streep) is a senator who schemes to get Shaw his never-named party's vice presidential nomination. As the election looms, Marco tries to convey his fears to Shaw, babbling about implants and nightmares and what really happened in the desert. In the background lurks the mysterious Manchurian Global, a biotech specializing in "combat supply services" that freely donates huge sums to the Shaw family campaigns and isn't above hiring a sinister doctor specializing in genetic manipulation to conduct top-secret experiments for them.

Though The Manchurian Candidate remake does unfurl its own modern twist – it would've been another movie entirely had Shaw been brainwashed by Osama bin Laden and company – and emerges a thought-provoking and entertaining film, it's ultimately a less shocking film than the original was at the time of its release (breathless line from that movie's trailer: "You'll swear there's never been anything like it!"). Even someone who hasn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 could hardly be taken aback by the idea that the U.S. government could fall under the control of a massive, self-serving corporation, or its citizens under media mind control. Some might say it already has – no Manchurian candidate required.

'The Manchurian Candidate' opens Fri/30 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.