REVIEWED - THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: Following his misconceived, miscast remake of Charade as The Trouble With Charlie, Jonathan Demme returns to the peak of his form with a powerful reworking of John Frankenheimer's allegorical 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, based on the prescient 1959 novel by Richard Condon, writes Michael Dwyer.
While remaining true to the essence of the original, Demme, collaborating with screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, smartly updates the story to the present, infusing it with an urgent topicality and the edgy, paranoia-steeped atmosphere of the great post-Watergate thrillers of the early 1970s, chiefly The Parallax View and All the President's Men.
The Cold War drama of the original has been transposed to the present and hinged on sinister events among a US platoon in Kuwait in 1991. The consequences involve brainwashing, political corruption and manipulation, a CCTV world of ubiquitous surveillance, and the machinations of an utterly ruthless corporation, Manchurian Global, which aspires to no less than having "a privately owned and operated" US president.
In a bravura portrayal, Meryl Streep chillingly plays a highly successful and wholly amoral New York senator, Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, whose principal benefactor has been Manchurian Global. She is ruthlessly ambitious for her son, Raymond (Liev Schrieber), a decorated hero in the first Gulf War and now a senator in his own right, and fiercely determined that he is selected as the vice-presidential candidate at her party's national convention, to join a glib, ineffectual presidential candidate on the ticket.
In one of the movie's creepiest scenes, Eleanor tenderly strokes her son's face as she declares, "The assassin always dies, baby. It's essential for the national healing."
Resembling Colin Powell both physically and in gravitas, Denzel Washington plays the moral centre of the drama, Major Bennett Marco, who served with Raymond Shaw in Kuwait and remains traumatised and confused by that experience, as it gradually begins to unravel in his nightmares.
This supremely stylish film, charged with unerring conviction by a terrific cast, is certainly Demme's finest film since his Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs. And it is remarkably subversive and provocative for a Hollywood studio production at a time when such fare is generally tamed by timidity and merchandising pressures, and rendered simplistic through the test-screening process.
