Paranoia For President

In 1962, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was too wildly improbable to believe-and that's why its satirical story about a Korean War veteran being brainwashed into a political assassin was such scary fun. The 60s assassinations that followed made the movie seem eerily prescient, and many viewers mistook that coincidence to be proof that it was a great movie.

Truth is, the '62 film, adapted by impish screenwriter George Axelrod from Richard Condon's burlesque thriller novel, was more kitschy than profound. Today it looks like a pretty scar hiding the malaise of the 60s. Its naïve shock (concerning war fatigue, political subterfuge, incest) doesn't do justice to the real-life sorrow that had once seemed unimaginable.

In his remake of that pop-cult classic, Jonathan Demme faces up to the problem of the pretty scar. Knowing now how horrific politics can be and having been jolted by actual, home-turf political assassination more than a few times, the only conscientious way Demme could approach this material is to account for the gravity of its premise. Oh what the hell, he had to transform an entertainment into a work of art. This new Manchurian Candidate takes place in a world that can conceive of assassination and political conspiracy all too well to simply enjoy it as a pasttime. Demme answers the call to make popular art serious again. If you can't hear that call, then a silly trifle like M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is the movie for you.

Like the first Manchurian Candidate, Shyamalan's film takes American paranoia as a joke, pretending that outlandishness amounts to a cautionary fable. Shyamalan still works in the humbug tradition that should have been discredited following the 60s social catastrophes. Demme, however, carries forward the political and moral scrutiny of 70s movies-that hallowed group of films by artists who were shocked into enlightenment-right into our contemporary era. Unfortunately, such forthrightness and vision are less admired now. Incredibly, some fans would rather hold to the '62 film as a model of escapism. Demme's film is better than that; its characters and storyline feel astonishingly present.

This version of The Manchurian Candidate has the distinction of being an emotional documentary. Demme has caught the temper of our day in the anxieties of several veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. These include Army Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington), who lectures to prospective inductees, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), a fast-track politician in line for a vice-president nomination. Both men share the delusion that the war enhanced them, but underneath their dutiful bravado, they suffer perplexing unease. Their nightmares signal a puzzling battlefield trauma. As Marco investigates what happened to him and Shaw and several others in their platoon, he unwittingly stirs up the distress that is spreading through the culture. Call it cynicism, perhaps, but different forms of it are apparent in Shaw's mother, Sen. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), a dazzling, terrifying political warhorse, and Rosie (Kimberly Elise) the young woman whose tenacity crosses Marco's desperate path. As each of these characters experiences a particular American nightmare, Demme takes care to detail their individual forms of social consciousness. Stick figures from '62 here become the embodiment of various political wills. Marco is skeptical, Shaw is befuddled, Eleanor is antagonistic and Rosie is intransigent.

Updating barely describes what Demme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris accomplish. They have done the rough work of imagining the story freshly, drawing assassination wariness as well as Desert Storm trepidation into each character's very breath. Demme's loose and demotic style (which made for unexpected, improvisatory marvels in The Truth About Charlie) makes this Manchurian Candidate an open, realistic narrative. Every scene searches out credible, humanistic detail: The surprised look a stenographer gives at Marco's military inquest is just a citizen registering natural political shock. A debilitated platoon buddy, Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright) confronts Marco like a street bum, but they exchange feeling across the wide gap of their contrasting fortunes (it is the homeless encounter that rattles all our security). Instead of soliciting the audience's fantasies, Demme asks for compassion. And it should come automatically in response to the vivid minutiae that distinguish this film from ^^^ typical genre fare. The post-9/11 imperative to address the audience's political worries explains Demme's good decision to reconstruct Manchurian Candidate. Shyamalan demonstrates a similar notion in The Village's parable of American isolationism. Borrowing both Hawthorne and Rod Serling, it's a far-fetched, often ludicrous tale of bewildered people seeking to escape the terrors of our modern domestic and political institutions; the problem is Shyamalan's poe; his fable is a dishonest-and alarmingly segregated-portrait of how Americans respond to crisis.

Thankfully, Demme appreciates American plurality; his antennae are alert to the various styles of American living-Marco's transient life, Shaw's affluent comfort; each style a psychological harbinger. With the exception of Altman and Spielberg, no other U.S. filmmaker is as attentive to our diverse polity. For Demme, heterogeneity is a cause for wonder. Yet he abjures patriotic pandering. Demme shows that Marco and Shaw's black and white worlds are separated, but he knows that the effects of power are indiscriminate. This film confronts how the corruption of our political ideas (it shows a convention as a battleground) affects the lives of men and women who are called to pay the price. This military reality could not be told sufficiently without recognition of race and class difference (even Frankenheimer got that point across). Denzel Washington's Marco isn't just a black stand-in; Demme gets the most sensitive performance of Washington's career to convey the trust-and political vulnerability-no one talks about. Frank Sinatra played Marco as a wised-up tough guy; Denzel's intimacy with his co-stars is based in all our mutual bewilderment. It's a political condition Demme understands so well that a shot of Marco's arrival in New York where he continues to search for the cause of his distress, has him rising out of a Penn Station tunnel, making his loneliness almost tactile.

Humanism verges into Expressionism-a new mode of feeling. Depicting American crisis through black characters was done cheaply-and divisively-by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, but Demme does it without false sentiment. Manchurian Candidate invokes the most insightful recent pop art by black artists-Rosie's apartment features posters for August Wilson plays, Al Melvin's graffiti-scrawled hovel evokes a hyper-paranoid Basquiat canvas. Even a shot of Denzel in torment includes a reverse angle of a Paul Robeson poster seen in a mirror (an image conveying the crisis of commitment). All this automatically broadens the film's political significance. The original movie satirized anti-Communist fear; Demme gets at a more deeply rooted and widespread paranoia. The sense that nothing we do in the years after the assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate and Desert Storm can be enough to repair our damaged nerves and memories is, essentially, a humanist plaint. Marco and Shaw talk with each other believably-like estranged brothers. ("Are we friends?" the white guy asks. "We are connected," is the black guy's unsentimental answer.) This evocation of Gulf War Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder is finer than all the pop savvy in Three Kings. And nothing in the original film had an emotional pull comparable to Shaw's losing himself in murder. His victim dies with a sad look, but Demme catches that he kills with a sad look.

None of that cool pop violence in The Village or Collateral or The Bourne Supremacy will do. As with the validation of Frankenheimer's film, people say they love film noir without knowing that it's not a flavor or color but a tone of spiritual philosophy. In Demme's morally recapitulated film noir, the communist bugaboo is replaced by a more dehumanizing threat-homegrown political betrayal and cultural insensitivity. The pretty scar we take for granted. Demme deemphasizes Frankenheimer's climax because we already know what's coming-not cinematically, but because we live paranoia and tragedy. ("There's always casualties of war, sir.")

Against the cynicism that prefers the pessimistic sarcasm of the 1962 film, Demme uses shrewdly judged craft and trenchant humanity to make a movie that eloquently addresses the ills of this era. The last looks between Marco and Shaw are achingly soulful. The scar is opened but Demme demonstrates the audacity of hope. o