Every Friday, were recommending an older movie thats available to stream or download and worth seeing again through the lens of our current moment. Were calling the series Revisiting Hours consider this Rolling Stones unofficial film club. This week: Scott Tobias on Jonathan Demmes 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
It never sounded like a good idea to remake The Manchurian Candidate. Majors studios are always looking to plunder the vaults, eager to turn yesterdays properties into tomorrows surefire hits, but John Frankenheimers 1962 conspiracy thriller wasnt Starsky and Hutch or Fat Albert or even The Stepford Wives, to name three other I.P. redoes hitting theaters in 2004. Jonathan Demme had tried to work his elusive magic on another early Sixties treasure, the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn confection Charade and wound up with The Truth About Charlie, the biggest critical and commercial disappointment of his career. Its better than its reputation look past Mark Wahlbergs wet sock of a lead performance and there are eclectic delights galore but the bad vibes seemed to follow him to which opened late in the summer to respectful reviews and quietly wilted in the August heat. It was never going to live up to the unimpeachable original, despite the ingenious casting of Meryl Streep as the movies Lady MacBeth in a pantsuit.
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Yet Demmes Manchurian Candidate did what remakes should do, which is to reimagine the same material to much different ends. The director took a Cold War freakout about the Korean conflict and the Communist threat, and turned it into Gulf War I story that actually comments on Gulf War II while continuing to tell the tale of American imperialism in the 21st century. Consider the audacity of the timing alone: Our nations excursion in Iraq had only just started the year before, under the false pretense that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration had done an excellent job ginning up popular support, mostly by fudging a connection between Iraq and the terrorists responsible for 9/11. So not only were Demme and company assessing an ongoing conflict something mainstream films have traditionally never done they were sharply criticizing a war that had not yet been deemed a fiasco. At a time when major studios were plundering the vaults, looking to turn yesterdays properties into tomorrows surefire hits, Demme slipped in like a thief in the night, smuggling a truly radical film under the cover of a Hollywood star vehicle.
Both films are clever acts of subversion. Working from Richard Condons novel about a war hero who returns as the unwitting agent of a communist plot, Frankenheimer and his screenwriter, George Axelrod, flipped a Kennedy-era Red Scare thriller on its head, decrying the paranoia and violence that had consumed American politics. They also provided a lasting metaphor for any politician who acts as a vessel for someone elses agenda, especially if that someone else hails from a hostile foreign nation. (Like, say, Russia.) Of the many tweaks Demme and his screenwriters, Daniel Pyre and Dean Georgaris, made to the original, the most important is changing Manchuria from a region in communist China to an American private equity firm, Manchurian Global, with its hands tucked elbow-deep in Congressional sock puppets. In Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), a Medal of Honor winner with a powerful U.S. Senator for a mother, nefarious parties see a chance to install the first privately owned and operated Vice President of the United States. Once there, theyre merely a rifle blast away from the top.
Some of the basics between the two films are the same: Denzel Washington steps into the Sinatra role of Maj. Bennett Marco, commander of a unit thats ambushed and taken hostage. But his memories of the events conflict with his dreams, which tell a much different story. Two of the men from his unit were killed in combat, despite Shaws courageous actions in the field; his dreams suggest, however, that he and Shaw each murdered one of the men under hypnosis (or, in a slight modification here, a high-tech medical implant). In both version, the pawn is not a particularly charismatic or likable man, even though his comrades-in-arms continually describe him as the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being Ive ever known in my life. And yet through the insistence of his mother, whos eager to use his heroics to further his familys political legacy, hes thrust into the Presidential race.
Where the movie differ, though, is crucial in appreciating how far Demme has gone recasting The Manchurian Candidate as a searingly of-the-moment political statement. By shifting the role of the Shaw matriarch from Angela Lansburys sinister behind-the-scenes operator to a sitting U.S. Senator, the film not only targets the complicity of Congress in filling the coffers of private war contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater, but specifically puts one sitting Senator in particular, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the crosshairs. Streep has vociferously denied basing her performance on the politician, but she certainly looks the part. And she more or less acts the role that way as well her Ms. Shaw is a hawkish Senator who voted in favor of the War in Iraq and triggered the attendant boom in contracts to private companies like Halliburton, which happened to be run by Dick Chaney before he became vice president.
Even if youre inclined to deny the connection between Eleanor Prentiss Shaw and Hillary Rodham Clinton though please also note the names, which are only one syllable off in the surname The Manchurian Candidate 04 is the rare case where not assigning parties to politicians is damning. Both parties are guilty. Manchurian Global is an effective stand-in for the entire Military-Industrial Complex, an insatiable beast that feeds on blood and treasure. It has no ideology other than money. The one major irony in the film is such a massive conspiracy isnt necessary. Manchurian Global doesnt have to go through the trouble to stage an ambush, brainwash an entire unit, and take ownership of a Medal of Honor winner with a clear path to the presidency. It just has to cut a check.
For admirers of Demme, there are a handful of appreciable touches on the margins: A Fortunate Son cover by Wyclef Jean, a near-silent (but indelibly sinister) performance by the musician Robyn Hitchcock, and the usual bit parts for delightful character actors and friends like Bill Irwin, Paul Lazar, Ted Levine, Charles Napier and Roger Corman. But The Manchurian Candidate is perhaps the angriest film of his career and one of his least recognizable, because hes so studious in channeling and redirecting Frankenheimers film to a bold new end.
What the filmmaker couldnt have known at the time and what he cant know now thats no longer with us is that his remake would become a movie about an endless war thats quietly, perpetually replenishing itself, with no clear goal or endpoint on the horizon. Over the summer, Blackwater founder Erik Prince renewed his pitch to privatize the war in Afghanistan, preying on President Trumps frustration that the umpteenth troop increase in the country had paid no dividends. This is the environment that Candidate 2.0 identified 14 years ago, when the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan still had popular support, were still viewed as achievable solutions to the terrorist threat. Now its tucked away on streaming services, as neglected and vital as a war buried deep in the queue.
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