Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate at 20: Just as Attuned To Its Eras Politics As the Original

 

John Frankenheimer’s adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate was one of the greatest films ever made, considered a classic when released and then put out of public view for twenty years afterward. The comparisons to Oswald were prominent in 1963 and even without seeing the movie the title had entered the vernacular by the time it came out both on TV and home video in the mid-1980s.

Frankenheimer always claimed that the movie was a black comedic satire rather than a thriller but the great thing is it works brilliantly as both. So many of the lines delivered by the Chinese and Russians play as deadpan humor, the scene where the captured troops believe they are attending a garden party is both frightening and hysterical in different context and the entire film is based on one of the greatest ironies of all: the Communists are planning to take over the United States by the use of a political candidate whose primary pull is anti-Communist rhetoric. The film is terrifying half the time and the other half you’re not sure how seriously to take it; the fact that so many people may have thought it could actually happen is a tribute to that.

When Jonathan Demme remade the movie in 2004, it already entered under a considerable burden. Even after his brilliant movies such as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia Demme had never been regarded anything near the great directors. He had followed Philadelphia with Beloved, which was seen as an Oprah Winfrey vanity project despite the fact that critics admired it and he had followed that with a remake of Charade that was justifiably loathed. The Manchurian Candidate was his follow-up to The Truth About Charlie and no one expected much despite the incredible cast. Released in August of 2004, the film received  a mixed critical reception. Some critics like Roger Ebert and Kenneth Turan immensely admired but the lion’s share chose to consider it an unnecessary remake of a classic. It didn’t help that it was a political satire being released in an election year and that so much of its message, which might have resonated years later, came at a time when even making anti-government films was considered aid and comfort to ‘the enemy’. The film died at the box office and was ignored in the awards circles that year.

Demme spent the rest of his career working in documentaries, music videos, independent films  and television. He still had the touch in movie: his last film major film Rachel Getting Married was a classic and he worked in several Emmy nominated and winning series, including Enlightened, The Killing  and Seven Seconds which won an Emmy for Regina King. But Demme almost never got a chance to direct another film of the scope of Manchurian Candidate again. Which is a great pity because I have seen the films several times in the 20 years since it was originally released and not only is it a real grower, the more you watch it the more it seems fitting to the era it was made in as the original was.

Indeed, just like the Frankenheimer version, Demme’s version is as fitting both in the terms of a thriller and a political satire to the 2000s as the original was to the 1960’s. While Demme has changed several details, he is fundamentally true to the formula of the original but I’d argue his satire is far deeper and darker. In the original Eleanor Shaw is determined to make her husband President and is using Anti-Communist rhetoric to arrange a Communist take over of the Country. In the 2004 version, Eleanor is determined to use the flag and patriotism (a big deal for the War on Terror) and allow a sleeper agent to take over the country for her corporation. In both cases, the means are an end so that she can herself run the country. Eleanor is so enraged by her son being used as the assassin in the original that her first act when being brought into power is to enact revenge on her own handlers. In Demme’s version, Eleanor is essentially using Manchurian Global as a means to realize the power she herself never could, something that enrages her fellow conspirators. There’s an argument that in Demme’s version Eleanor is far less caring. Angela Lansbury loves her son but is infuriated that he is being used as a tool by the Communists, something she didn’t want for him. Meryl Streep is not only fully aware of her son being used by the powers that be but in her final scene with him makes it very clear that she thinks she did this for his own good. “It’s so you could have what I never could,” she tells Raymond as she tenderly bathes him. By this point she’s already used him to kill the woman he loved and doesn’t seem to care about it: she got in the way and therefore had  to be ground into dirt.

Streep in 2004 was in the midst of the career revival that has continued to this day: she had won back to back Golden Globes for Adaptation in 2002 and Angels in America in 2003. She would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for this film (the only major award Manchurian Candidate was during the entire 2004 Oscar season) but lost to Natalie Portman for Closer. (Cate Blanchett ended up taking Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator.) It’s hard to ever claim an example of Meryl Streep being robbed by the Oscars of a nomination, far too many of her roles are an example of her being nominated, as Jared Leto once said as a joke, ‘in accordance with California State Law’. But I honestly think Streep’s work in Manchurian Candidate is superior to quite a few of the films in the 21^st century she was nominated for; I certainly prefer it to the one she got the Oscar for in The Iron Lady.

I have noticed a distinct shift in the kind of roles Streep took ever since she tied Katherine Hepburn in 1999 for most nominations any actor had ever gotten. Overall watching her work in this century you see a looser, freer Streep who seems to take a kind of pleasure in the roles she takes more than she did in the 1980s and 1990s. Ever since she awed us with her comic performance in Adaptation her work has been just excellent as ever but far more often she seems to be taking more pleasure in it then she did, say, in Sophie’s Choice and Out of Africa. In her brilliant work as Miranda Priestley, Julia Child and Florence Foster Jenkins you can see she’s clearly just as great a performer as before but now she’s actually having as much as the audience.

This is seen to a great extent in her interpretation of Eleanor Shaw. It’s obvious that she’s modeled after Hilary Clinton, particularly her pantsuits, but you get the thing that Streep is playing the version of Hilary that the right-wing has been claiming she’d been for the past decade and the one that they still believe she is. Eleanor is threatening the Democratic elders to destroy the party’s chances of winning in November if they don’t put her son on the ticket, treating her fellow Senators with complete disdain, complaining her fellow male conspirators on Manchurian Global don’t have the balls to do what’s needed. And in all of the people she speaks with she regards with the infantilizing tone that so many Republicans truly believe Democrats think of everybody. Even in the final scene with her son, she chides him like a child. “The assassin always dies,” she tells him. “It’s necessary for the national healing.” You almost find it refreshing when she’s giving orders to kill people; at least she seems to be honest with her emotions. Streep is clearly having the time of her life, and that’s telling because so much of the rest of the film is dark and solemn.

Another reason fans may have turned away from the movie was because of the performance of Denzel Washington in the lead as Ben Marco. Oddly enough this may be one of Washington’s greatest performances for the same reason it isolated so many people at the time. Washington is best known for being a charismatic leading man, filled with dynamism and energy. This was true as much as when he plays heroic characters such as Malcolm X as it was with his Oscar winning role in Training Day. That’s not the Washington we see here, any more than it is the one we would see in other Oscar nominated roles such as in Flight or as Macbeth.

Ben Marco, in Frankenheimer’s version, started out as heroic but was suffering from nightmares and delusions. Eventually he confronts them and the government gets on his side and Sinatra’s heroism comes through. We never see that in Washington’s version. Indeed after the introductory scenes, we see that Ben Marco has followed his delusion down the same rabbit hole that so many conspiracy nuts have over the years. Furthermore, in keeping with the nature of Internet, the Army considers his ravings an embarrassment and after a certain amount of time, they cut him loose because they believe he’s deluded. The only person who seems to trust him is Rosie, played in this version by Kimberly Elise. Washington plays the entire movie looking like he can barely hold things together and that he is doing so with both hands. It’s such a radical departure from what we’re used to him that I’d actually rank it as one of his best performance purely because its so atypical. He’s given great performances since but rarely has he tried something this daring again.

In Frankenheimer’s version, Shaw is aware of what is going on almost from the start and it has made him arrogant. Laurence Harvey’s version was that of a spoiled brat who barely could hold contempt for himself. He derides the remarks everyone’s made about him; he knows no one could stand him in the unit.

Live Schreiber takes on a different tone. Throughout much of the film he comes across as the Medal of Honor recipient and war hero we believe him to be. He is something of a cats-paw to his mother but he’s more defiant of her then in the original and more obviously in love with Josie Jordan (Vera Farmiga in one of her first major film roles). During this film Shaw thinks Marco is troubled and delusional, an idea carried out when Marco bites him in the midst of a public meeting. By that point, even though the viewer knows that Marco is on the right track, we’re still inclined to think he might be wrong about Shaw.

That may be the most daring change to the original: Shaw is the Vice Presidential candidate and not his father. For that reason while we see Shaw commit the same crimes in the brainwashing scenes then before, in the present he doesn’t commit any major violent acts. Then when Tom Jordan (Jon Voight in one of the rare, restrained performances of his career) confronts Eleanor and Raymond, Eleanor uses Raymond to kill Jordan – and then Josie. One of the images I’ve rarely forgotten is the sight of a brainwashed Raymond walking blankly through water up to his waist, calmly apologizing before he drowns Jordan – and then almost as an afterthought the woman he loves.

The brainwashing has been moved to the First Gulf War but we are clearly meant to think of the one going on in 2003, and the fact that Manchurian is now essentially a global corporation rather than Communism is a deeper meaning, one that almost certainly hurt the film at the box office. By August of 2004, the shine was officially off the War in Iraq and the battle lines had been drawn, with patriotism on one side and oil in another. Perhaps some people thought that when Jordan says Shaw was going to be ‘the first corporate Vice President in America’ they thought it was too soft; many Democrats had the opinions of Dick Cheney already and they might have wondered why a corporation would be this clandestine. Aren’t the campaign contributions enough, they might have thought.

The film also has a much higher body count then the original. In the film, most of the soldiers come back alive from the attack. In the film we see two murdered and by the time it begins most of the rest of the troop has died of ‘natural causes’, though Marco is clear none of them were natural. (One of the victims is played by Pablo Schreiber, Liev’s brother, who was on the verge of becoming a great character actor in his own right.) At the start of the movie, the sole remaining survivor, besides Marco and Shaw, is Al Melvin, played by Jeffrey Wright in a brief but chilling performance. By this point Melvin is a paranoid mess, ranting and raving in the sight of Shaw. That he dies later in the film is far from a surprise; we can see that the difference between him and Marco was that Marco was, at least for a while, better at hiding his problems.

The final half-hour of the film is vastly different from the original. But it is worth noting that in his positive review of it Ebert said that he liked the changes. In his own reviews of the original Ebert wrote that he had theorized that Sinatra had been similarly brainwashed and that Rosie was in fact his controller. I don’t know if Demme read Ebert’s reviews and decided it was a good idea or whether he came up with it on his own, but the last half hour closely parallel Ebert’s theories.

How the original film ends I will leave you to discover, but I have to say it too fits in with the model of changing the movie for the times. In Frankenheimer’s version, Raymond makes a sacrifice beyond measure to destroy the conspiracy and Demme’s version carries out  a different variation with different trigger men and different players on the podium. The ending also has a satiric finish that I appreciate as a different set of powers that be arrange a manipulation of the truth to make sure that the right people are punished and that no one learns just how badly they blundered what happened.

As we enter another election cycle it may seem like Demme’s Manchurian Candidate is as quaint as the original seems to be. I believe both films are incredibly on point. It is true Frankenheimer’s is more evergreen than Demme’s was but that doesn’t make his film any less pertinent or indeed satirically brilliant. Just like Frankenheimer’s, Demme holds all the sacred cows  and ideologies to a twisted mirror that still reflects a world we can see to this day. If the only difference between now and twenty years ago is that the crazies seem to be legitimate and in some cases more prominent in elected politics, that doesn’t mean the links aren’t there. We’ve seen many TV shows since Demme’s version take a similarly twisted view of DC – House of Cards and Scandal for drama; Veep for comedy -  but Demme was there first and in many ways, his version is superior because he saw the darkness in the message. The politics may have been a joke. The message behind it, deadly serious.