By Jeremy Lott on 8.3.04 @ 12:06AM
The new Manchurian Candidate falls victim to its own corporate greed.
Director Jonathan Demme's remake of the 1962 political thriller
The Manchurian Candidate lost at the box office this
weekend. It was easily outstripped by M. Night Shyamalan's
supernatural phychodrama The Village and ended up in a
dogfight for second place with another programmed assassin in
The Bourne Supremacy, which it lost. Since
Supremacy had opened the previous week, this was a
devastating debut.
The original flick was about a soldier who was captured during
the Korean War and brainwashed by Communists to assassinate the
presidential nominee. When a Communist-sympathizer shot President
Kennedy in November of 1963, Frank Sinatra, the film's star, who
owned the rights and who the FBI suspected of having flirted with
radical left-wing politics when he was younger, had it removed from
all remaining theaters. It was rarely shown on television and
wasn't widely available until it was re-released theatrically in
1987.
But where the original Candidate proved too on target
with its over-the-top-ness, the new one is suffering from the
opposite problem. As I filed out with other moviegoers on opening
night, the most common complaint I overheard was that this movie
wasn't frightening enough.
I take their point. Both movies are deeply paranoid projects,
but they're paranoid about different things, and not all paranoias
are created equal. For the first film, remember, the country had a
lot of things dangling over its head: Communist advances in Asia
and Europe, trials and hearings about Communist infiltration of
government agencies, the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, the Cold
War loomed large. There was a very real sense that the U.S. could
lose it all to the Soviet Union and Red China.
Along came a movie that said, "Buddy, you don't know the half of
it." The would-be assassin is a decorated war hero, programmed to
kill on command without remorse. And in case anybody missed the
point about how we can no longer trust authority figures, he wears
a priest outfit to do the hit. The assassin's mother is a Soviet
agent. His stepfather, a Sen. Joe McCarthy knockoff and
vice-presidential nominee, is her marionette. And this happy family
is but one bullet away from the nomination and the presidency.
This year's Candidate is worried about other things.
Set at some point not too far in the future (say 2008), the U.S. is
still engaged in a slippery war on terror, but the terrorists
aren't the bad guys. The Manchurian in the title stands for
Manchurian Global, a defense contractor that sounds suspiciously
like Halliburton, the company that Vice President Cheney used to
run. The current administration is balking at some of the
contractor's fees, so Manchurian decides to change
administrations.
Enter Sen. Raymond Shaw (played by Liev Schreiber), a decorated
war hero from the first Gulf War, son of the tough-as-nails Sen.
Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep) -- Hillary Clinton, Lady Macbeth, and
Ann Coulter rolled into one. Eleanor manages to bluster her son
onto the ticket and it's up to Major Ben Marco (Denzell Washington
in the role played by Sinatra in the earlier go-round) to save the
day.
The commercial problem for the new Candidate is that,
try as he might, director Demme can't make Americans fear
corporations in the same way that they once did the Communists. The
USSR invaded countries and fed people to the Gulags. Halliburton
may occasionally overcharge for gasoline. See the difference?
There are two more things that this Candidate is
paranoid about in a way that the first wasn't: technology and
women. In the first flick, when Marco finally got Shaw to talk
about his past, he made Shaw gloss over the technical details of
how they programmed him, and the thing that triggered Shaw -- a Red
Queen -- could be found in an ordinary deck of playing cards. This
time, chips are implanted in heads, microchips are bitten out of
people's backs, surveillance cameras loom large, and assassination
orders are delivered by cellphone.
And last time the fair sex got a fairer shake. As Raymond Shaw's
mother, Angela Lansbury may have been a cunning, diabolical
operator, but the other women in the film made the audience
understand that she was the exception. Then: When Raymond was made
to kill his new wife, it was a truly disturbing scene. Now: When he
drowns his childhood sweetheart, it barely registers. Women are
simply not a force for good, and Meryl Streep's turn as the modern
assertive female politician is truly something to behold. To cast
it in familiar terms, if she were Eve shopping an apple around, I
know very few men who would have the fortitude to refuse to bite
down.
topics:
Hillary Clinton, Television, Movies
