"The Manchurian Candidate"

Schreiber's Raymond Shaw is similarly abstruse -- it's impossible to get a read on him, and we never feel as compassionate toward him as we do to the sympathetic bastard played by Harvey in the original. Still, Schreiber is too sensitive an actor to leave us with nothing: At times you can see him working to fill out corners of his character that the writers failed to provide. The most resonant character of all may be that of Rosie, Marco's love interest, played by Kimberly Elise, who isn't afraid to put some sass and zing into her lines.

If some normally fine actors flounder in "The Manchurian Candidate," the biggest star of them all flops big-time: Streep sweeps into the role of Eleanor Prentiss Shaw with the industriousness of a high-toned cleaning lady -- that humming, swooshing sound you hear whenever she's on-screen denotes her A-1 professional-quality scrubbing. During the course of her much-lauded career, Streep has rarely let us forget that acting is work with a capital W. She's at her best when she's doing comedy: Her cartoon-swan breeziness is her great, underused gift.

But in her dramatic roles -- particularly many of her recent ones -- she's the lamest of the grand dames. As Eleanor, she's dressed in a palette of satiny grays and oysters; she often wears chunky but understated gray pearls or a glittery brooch or sometimes (the audacity!) both at once. The understatement of those outfits and accessories is a ruse that fools you into thinking Streep herself is understated, when in reality, every one of her lines has been marked up with acting-class accents and emphatically italicized syllables: "I will see you impeached on the floor of the Senate and BURY you." "I will do whatever I can to protect America from anyone who opposes HER." Streep squints and simpers flirtatiously and venomously, but nothing sticks: Her treachery always feels like a state of mind she studied hard for. To be fair to Streep, part of the problem is thoughtless casting: Streep and Schreiber have no erotic charge whatsoever. That incestuous frisson is essential to the dynamic of the relationship, but it's just another subtlety that Demme hasn't paid much attention to, except perhaps as an item on his checklist of doodads to cover.

Anyone who has followed Jonathan Demme's long and varied career knows there isn't just one Demme, but at least two. I would still say that the Demme of "Melvin and Howard" and "Something Wild" (and even of the superbly ridiculous "Married to the Mob") understood America so well -- or, more specifically, understood the crazy risks we Americans are willing to take to preserve our personal and collective metaphors of freedom -- that he'd be the best director to remake "The Manchurian Candidate." But the Demme of "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia" -- in other words, the sanctimonious entertainer with a serious mission -- is the worst.

And unfortunately, that's the Demme we get here. This "Manchurian Candidate" isn't even remotely subversive; it merely confirms everything we already know. And although I know this wasn't Demme's intent, the movie's political idealism is so facile, so one-dimensional, that it almost becomes the exact opposite of idealism -- a kind of clinical cynicism.

There's no underlying strangeness to this "Manchurian Candidate" -- it gives us nothing to wrap our imagination around. In the movie's press materials, Demme is quoted as saying that he strove for scientific authenticity in portraying the memory manipulation and mind control that's inflicted on the characters. This "Manchurian Candidate" is less fantastical than the original and thus less believable. Because everything in it is so assiduously explained, it has a sense of order and correctness that the original doesn't: This isn't a world spinning out of control, but a world that has been knocked off its axis, artfully, so we're sure to get the point. In movie terms, it is its own craftily engineered candidate. Are we going to be smart enough, and autonomous enough, not to buy it?

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