Of the many “unnecessary remakes” of the 2000s, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate is among the laziest and poorly-executed. Released in July 2004, Demme’s update of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 paranoid classic is remarkably non-partisan and vague, adhering to the beats of the original with some necessary adjustments for period. Denzel Washington’s in the Frank Sinatra role, while Liev Schreiber picks up where Laurence Harvey left off with Raymond Shaw, the rare movie character name to stick in the pop consciousness for half a century. Instead of Korea, Washington and Schreiber are Gulf War veterans, and in the decade-plus since their service, most of their fellow soldiers have died or descended into insanity. The film opens in Iraq with an ambush, though it’s unclear who got who and why; we’re quickly thrust into the present, where Washington’s a Major but essentially a paper-pusher, while Schreiber is the dark horse nominee for Vice President. His mother, indelibly played by Angela Lansbury in the original, is played by Meryl Streep, who’s uncharacteristically broad and thoroughly comic, never matching the menace that Lansbury brought to the role.
Demme’s Manchurian Candidate dutifully follows Frankenheimer: Washington’s amnesia fades and he begins to remember a series of bizarre and traumatic experiments performed on him and his unit in 1991, he finds a new girlfriend/controller on the train (reunited with John Q’s Kimberly Elise in the Janet Leigh role), tries to talk to Schreiber but sounds crazy, and eventually gets just enough evidence to get Elise and the rest of the feds on his side before rejecting his programming and assassinating Schreiber and Streep rather than the nominee for President. The creeps at Manchurian Global, a creepy cut-out similar to the Parallax Corporation, are beside themselves, in tears and ready to commit mass suicide. Senator Jon Voigt and daughter Vera Farmiga may be dead, but the plan has been exposed, and our country—presumably—will live happily ever after.
Frankenheimer’s film isn’t as neat. Harvey, not Sinatra, is the assassin; the “Manchurian Candidate” is a crypto-communist cultivated in, where else, Manchuria. The candidate is killed, but Harvey commits suicide immediately after; in Demme’s version, Washington is saved at the last minute by improbably sympathetic feds. Schreiber’s candidate isn’t an ideologue as much as an empty vessel for private equity, and the Manchurian Global group isn’t advancing any political agenda beyond making more money. In an era flush with Dumb Bush jokes, Demme’s Manchurian Candidate skirts obvious contemporary parallels and takes the easy way out at every opportunity. His Manchurian Candidate, an ostensibly grounded political thriller with no supernatural elements, has far less to say about America in the first decade of the 21st century than Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, a superior remake released just one year later.
Demme was a friend and remains a favorite of Paul Thomas Anderson, who most recently cited the influence of Something Wild on his own One Battle After Another. Like Anderson, Demme was a conformist liberal who peaked in his late-40s with The Silence of the Lambs; after that horror thriller swept the 1992 Oscars, Demme spent the rest of his career making movies straight down the middle, garnering perfunctory praise for Oscar bait like Philadelphia and Beloved before jobbing in Hollywood, first remaking Stanley Donen’s Charade as The Truth About Charlie in 2002 before his 2004 Manchurian update. His untimely death in 2017 at 73 marked an unresolved career, with a string of compromises and polite art house movies following the epochal phenomenon of The Silence of the Lambs. If Anderson lacks a critical and commercial hit of similar standing, he’s certainly wasting no time descending into liberal ambivalence and artistic mediocrity.
Demme, like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola, got his start working for Roger Corman, and in the 1970s he made five exploitation movies that rank far above the middlebrow dross he’d go on to churn out. Even the “classic” Demme films of the 1980s like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild are thoroughly bland and undecided; his films are humorous but rarely funny, and strong emotions are inhibited by a need to please the “right people,” all while carrying the pretensions of a “serious” filmmaker. If being milquetoast weren’t damning enough, Demme’s craft is remarkably shoddy, with buzzed focus, jerky zooms, and sloppy camera movements in The Silence of the Lambs and The Manchurian Candidate. Regular collaborator Tak Fujimoto isn’t to blame, judging by his stellar work in 2008’s The Happening—rather, Demme never grew beyond the technical limitations of Corman’s world, just as his pretensions toward “serious filmmaking” ballooned beyond belief. He remains the most overrated and pretentious American director of his generation, with no clear runner-up. As he moves into his mid-50s, I hope that Anderson doesn’t follow his lead.
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