A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Date Viewed: 8/7/04

Details:

Denzel Washington (Ben Marco)

Liev Schreiber (Raymond Shaw)

Meryl Streep (Senator Eleanor Shaw)

Kimberly Elise (Rosie)

Jon Voight (Senator Thomas Jordan)

Vera Farmiga (Jocelyne Jordan)

Director: Jonathon Demme

Score: +

The Review: It all starts with the dreams, very bad dreams, haunting and explicit dreams -- dreams that seem to be the only reason this movie is "R"-rated. Something happened during 1991's Iraqi Desert Storm to a platoon of US soldiers, and although Sergeant Shaw (Schneider) seems to have led them to safety and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, there might be alternate memories, deeply buried under heavily trampled ground, and the alternate story is not pretty.

The screenplay / adaptation is clearly different from the earlier 1962 version, with roles and responsibilities rewritten; Denzel Washington gets to recreate Frank Sinatra's earlier role. (But since I've not read Condon's original novel, I don't know which version, if either, is closer to its message.) The title has taken a peculiar reattribution, changing from a racial epithet (in the original) into a corporate logo; oddly, this is one of the more jarring aspects of this remake.

Side-by-side comparison with the original (1962) B&W movie:

• For all that the titles & character names are identical and the general outline is similar, these have two different plots with significant differences in nuance. They are different movies masquerading as original and remake. It's not just a different set of actors in a different Weltanshaung, but important plot details have been re-assigned, re-invented, crafted anew and twisted around. (At least that's the perspective given that you've seen both versions close enough together in time.) Personally, I think the plotting of this newer version is more interesting and makes more sense (with one exception deriving from what one would think about the difficulty of eluding one's Secret Service detail). On the other hand, the suspension of disbelief required for the earlier version is substantially less: that which instills control is more technologically in sync with the times. Maybe it's because we grew up with the reality (?) of psychological torture as a brainwashing tool, but are unwilling to grant sufficient scientific and medical knowledge to design and implant a controlling neural chip.
• Streep's mother is altogether more believable and certainly better acted than Lansbury's character. One would almost think Lansbury's portrayal was intentionally satiric, in a cautionary tale that was not originally authored as a satire. It's not just the tenor of the times and the (then) scarcity of women in national politics: Streep's senator is just much better than Lansbury's strident hoyden, and perhaps all the more chilling for that.
• Washington's performance (as Bennett Marko) is much more paranoid, significantly more edgy and unbalanced than Sinatra's, but part of this comes from a different screenplay and different roles assigned to the same character in different versions. Sinatra is more obviously a continuing player in Army Intelligence's investigation, whereas Washington (albeit still in the Army) is sidelined from the investigation and clearly becomes himself the target of its attentions. On the other hand, the consequence is that Washington has a larger stage on which to act, a more complex character to work with, and becomes a more interesting (and decidedly less wooden) person.
• Laurence Harvey's (1962) Shaw was clearly cast from the hard-assed curmudgeon mold and it's hard to imagine him falling in love, but Schneider's (2004) character is actually likeable, if occasionally remote. Perhaps this difference accounts for the almost invisible role of Senator Jordan's daughter Jocelyn in the remake: there's less need to establish the extreme ranges of Shaw's personality, and this likely accounts for the enhanced role of Jocelyn (Leslie Parrish) in the earlier version.

(8-Aug-04)

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