Review

Review Date: 1-August-04
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Before I watched a movie this weekend, I was of course assaulted by a slew of advertisements issued by companies that aim to control society and our minds. I was more than usually offended this time around, for one would-be instrument of manipulation included a close-up of a woman's tightly clad nipples becoming erect, and another narrated the tragically thwarted attempts to get laid by a boy who couldn't have been a day over thirteen. These images forced me to acknowledge (once again) that there is no restraint anymore, no modesty, no mystery, no sanctity, nothing hidden or shocking or off limits in public. Unfortunately, this acknowledgment proved to be a fitting introduction to "The Manchurian Candidate," 21st-century style.

Several years have passed since I rented the original "Candidate" from 1962, and I remember only two things about it clearly: a stifling sense of secrecy and paranoia (epitomized by a strange scene in which Frank Sinatra meets Janet Leigh on a train), and how truly chilling Angela Lansbury was as a mother who sells out her son. In the modernized version of the tale, the prevailing feeling isn't secrecy and paranoia but barefaced victimization. Director Jonathan Demme displays the exact opposite of subtlety, leaving nothing to the imagination, ramming the camera into faces and wounds and nightmares, and parading issues of war, politics, and patriotism (in an election year) to generate the illusion of drama. But this style, so indicative of the world in which we live, destroys the ability to feel astonishment, and even concern. I don't know about you, but I believe that enormous corporations led by monsters without souls are attempting to dominate the globe. I believe that they already control America's government, so that the entire political system is a sham. I believe that the media feeds us nothing but scripted sound bytes. I believe that the military would do horrible things to its own employees, most of whom are lower-class men of color with few other options in life. I believe that there are far-reaching conspiracies of which we'll never know and little people sacrificed to corruption every day. Faced with graphic depictions of these things without any opportunity for doubt, suspense, or the horror that comes when you're left to fill in the blanks, I could only ask of Demme and his film: what the hell else do you got?

What "The Manchurian Candidate" has is Denzel Washington, so it's not a complete failure. As a Desert Storm veteran who thinks he was brainwashed for some terrible purpose, he never succumbs to the excess around him and remains pitifully distraught and confused (except in one off-the-shelf action-movie moment which everyone in the theater but me applauded). When he speaks of the core within himself that defies the forces without, it suggests the existence of the human spirit as a glitch in the system (but not for long). The rest of the cast cannot match his class: Liev Schreiber is unconvincing both as a real person and as a vice-presidential candidate; Kimberly Elise, in Leigh's role, gains in importance but loses in fascination; and Meryl Streep slips over the top as Schreiber's harpy mother, a senator with evil but vague aspirations. (Lansbury was scarier even without overtly hankering to give her son a blowjob.) Washington excepted, everyone and everything about "The Manchurian Candidate" is too obvious, too in-your-face, and too much like a made-for-TV movie on Fox. ("No one should miss the season's most shocking event, from the network that brought you 'The Swan!'") In 2004, "The Manchurian Candidate" disturbs only by not being disturbing anymore.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.