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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Even Meryl Streep's a bust in Jonathan Demme's toothless, gutless remake of one of the best political movies ever made. In fact, she's the biggest bust of all.
Jul 30, 2004 | Politically speaking, we live in a dangerous world, one in which simplistic slogans have taken the place of nuance, in which thought is discouraged and meek acceptance of any evidence placed before us is rewarded. That explains how we get toothless, gutless, one-note political movies like Jonathan Demme's "The Manchurian Candidate," a picture that purports to have a galvanizing, liberal-minded theme (big business is taking over our country and our lives) but is really just ploddingly pedestrian.
"The Manchurian Candidate," arriving in theaters just months before an important election and at a time when many Americans feel distrustful of their government, may seem to be tip-tapping at a sensitive national nerve. But its timeliness gives it only the tiniest edge over other lackluster, run-of-the-mill summer entertainments like "I, Robot" -- and it isn't even as dumbly entertaining as some of them. God save us from boring relevance.
Admittedly, "The Manchurian Candidate" has the disadvantage of being a remake of one of the most subversively intelligent political movies ever made -- one that is also hauntingly melancholy, particularly for those of us who consider ourselves left patriots. (Please note that if you haven't seen the original and are sensitive to spoilers, you may want to stop reading here.) The original, made by John Frankenheimer in 1962 (adapted, superbly, from Richard Condon's novel by George Axelrod), starred Frank Sinatra as Maj. Ben Marco, who returns home from the Korean War to find himself troubled by brutal dreams that may actually be memories. As it turns out, other soldiers from his company are having the same nightmare. Marco digs for an explanation, and the more he discovers about these recurring common dreams, the less sense they make to him.
The secret behind them, he discovers, lies deep within one of his fellow soldiers, the dour and unlikable Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), whose voluptuously sinister mother, Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury, in a performance as direct and as murderous as a sleek, jeweled machete), has a hold on him that goes beyond the Oedipal -- although of course, it enfolds elements of that, too. Eleanor, whom we always see dressed in lavishly embroidered silks and satins, is a Communist masquerading as a stalwart McCarthyist foot soldier -- a dragon lady zealously playing the part of upstanding citizen. As a means of furthering the political career of her husband, a colorless, dopey U.S. senator (James Gregory, standing in for Joe McCarthy), she has masterminded a scheme that turns her own son into a programmed assassin without a conscience. What she really wants, it seems, is something even more complicated than power. She wants to take a sledgehammer to democracy itself.
"The Manchurian Candidate"
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep
That's only a surface-skimming description of the original "Manchurian Candidate," a picture that's sometimes spoken of as if it were just an entertaining anti-McCarthyist relic or a sci-fi-tinged paranoia fantasy. Frankenheimer's "Manchurian Candidate" is a claustrophobic, obsessively controlled meditation on what it means to love your country, and how a certain kind of fear is a necessary component of that love. "Freedom from fear" was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's well-intentioned dreams for Americans, but it was a misguided one: Truly loving your country means fearing for its future, every day and every night, through peacetime as well as war, through moderate administrations as well as radical ones, through quiet times as well as eras clouded by terrorist threats.
The movie's recurring images of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator -- we see his serious, glowering countenance in a hanging portrait, as a bust, as the base of a cheesy lamp -- are a reminder that freedom isn't a gift, or even a right, but a responsibility, and an often weighty burden. Poor Lincoln, as he sat with his wife enjoying a dramatic entertainment (the contemporary equivalent might be a weekend evening at the movies), took a bullet for freedom -- which is to say he took a bullet for a metaphor. Frankenheimer's picture asks us to weigh which metaphors we'd be willing to take a bullet for.
