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Not a direct remake of the sweaty, paranoid original by John Frankenheimer, but another adaptation of the source material, this version of The Manchurian Candidate still can’t seem to emerge from the omnipresent shadow of the 1962 film. Not entirely fair as this version makes numerous changes (some that pay off, many that don’t) to the narrative and truly tries valiantly to be its own. The problem is, the changes more often than not render the story as a mere political thriller that becomes ephemeral while the other lasts for its political ramifications, trenchant satire and dark humor, or its hothouse of escalating paranoia.
Jonathan Demme’s reworking of the material is far too self-serious for much of the time and it throws the material off balance. It plays all of its science-fiction brainwashing with a straight face and this causes some of the audacity to wash away. This one reveals itself less and less about vast potential conspiracy theories or foreign entities disrupting our political system and more about the vast media landscape and the power of corporations over our lives. It’s necessary to differentiate itself, but something is deeply lost in the mix.
A major change is how Denzel Washington’s Marco is now more of a piece of the central plot whereas Frank Sinatra’s was merely trying to help Shaw regain his life and mind by exposing the puppet strings. Here, Marco is not only intertwined with the conspiracy, but he’s a pawn that they can use to justify and examine their ends. This all holds together until the very end where things don’t just go sideways, but buckle under the strains and fall apart. It ends with Marco setting a photo of his platoon adrift at sea while walking around the brainwashing facility, and the whole thing smacks of contrived and reaching uplift. It doesn’t jive with the rest of the world and ideas expressed within this film.
This would all be forgivable if Mrs. Iselin, here reworked as a long-term Senator, was as engrossing and disturbing as she was in the original. Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Iselin was a terrifying ice queen who pulled the strings out of lustful ambitions for power. She was a woman who would happily give everything to achieve her goals in an Old Testament-style form of sacrifice. Here Senator Shaw is a woman operating out of mere hubris and is far less shocking and villainous. Try as valiantly as Meryl Streep might to reconstitute the role into her own imagining, there’s no removing Lansbury’s career achievement work in the original and Streep’s essay on the role comes across poorly.
Then there’s the choice to downgrade the tragedy of Raymond Shaw. Laurence Harvey, not a great actor by any stretch, expressed a haunted, wounded soul that was marching towards a tragic ending no matter what. Liev Schreiber’s Shaw is missing that sense of impending doom, of a noose lingering over his head just waiting to coil around his neck and tighten. It is a unique spin on the material to watch Raymond and his mother locked in a death embrace on the world’s stage as their preordained doom awaits, but it hit you harder in the gut when it was Raymond himself taking out his enemies and then himself.
It remains nearly impossible to gauge this film on its own merits because it plays everything so damn earnestly. It’s the sight of a bunch of very talented people taking on juicy material and then delivering something pedestrian with it. It’s competent and nothing more, and that’s the grand tragedy of this version of The Manchurian Candidate. Of the spate of unnecessary remakes released in the mid-00’s (The Omen, The Amityville Horror among them), this is probably be the best of that lot. But that’s damning it with the faintest of praise.
