The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Paramount DVD (region 4)
d. Jonathan Demme; pr. Tina Sinatra, Scott Rudin, Jonathan Demme, Ildna Herzberg; scr. Daniel Pyne, Dean Georgaris; orig scr. George Axelrod; novel. Richard Condon; ph. Tak Fujimoto; m. Rachel Portman; ed. Carol Littleton, Craig McKay; cast. Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Scheiber, Jon Voight, Kimberly Elise, Jeffrey Wright, Ted Levine (125 mins)
A Congressional Medal of Honour winner (Liev Schreiber) from the Kuwait Gulf War is being groomed for political office by his mother (Meryl Streep).
Gradually, a member of his unit (Denzel Washington), diagnosed with Gulf War Syndrome, has disturbing flashbacks to the war experience that suggest that Screiber is more than what he seems – that an entire platoon have been hypnotized as part of a sinister agenda. Washington is driven to find out what really happened during the Kuwait incident that elevated Schreiber to US hero and likely vice-presidential nominee.
Recurrent news broadcasts of updates on the War on Terror make The Manchurian Candidate, a remake of the John Frankenheimer classic of the Cold War, the first political thriller post 9-11 to feature the War on Terror as a political background.
The first Presidential election since 9-11 forms the backdrop to this timely update of what was in 1962, the pinnacle of American political satire. A likely vice-Presidential candidate here openly says that the terrorist enemy was one spawned by previous foreign policy – a view the Bush government flatly considered unpatriotic and irrelevant to 9-11 – but that the real enemy to America are from those who compromise American ideals of civil liberty. Compromises to US ideals of civil liberty in the wake of 9-11 would surface strongly in a wave of films by 2007, embracing terrain informing this political thriller.
The campaign is to free America from the grip of fear. War-hero Raymond Shaw is primed for political service by his ambitious mother Streep who is propelled by ethical compromises to civil liberty which her opponents find unconstitutional.
Streep feels there is a nuclear threat emerging against the USA not from terrorists but from an alliance of enemy nations emboldened by recent attacks against America and the anti-unilateral action movement then informing America as they prepared for the Iraq War. Shaw platforms on the difference between real security and the need to feel safe: but his stance, whilst admirable, is revealed in the end to be a façade of rhetoric concealing a far darker agenda rooted in global corporate enterprise – the potentially malevolent company Manchurian Global, whose role in the War on Terror lurks in the background.
A geo-political corporate extension of government policy, Manchurian Global manipulate military technology for their own profit, are involved in Guantanamo Bay and negotiating with the Saudis on a missile defense shield. The employment of a wanted war criminal medical researcher by Manchurian Global speaks to the legacy of the US government using Nazi scientists following World War Two, although the idea here is that the ethics of the War on Terror condone such behaviour. The incipient criticism of ethics during the War on Terror years would saturate American film in a wave of terrorist films in 2007-8, many of which were driven by such ethical concerns. Although The Manchurian Candidate prefers to use them suggestively, as background for the thriller, the context makes the film a fine update of the material for a War on Terror mentality.
The primary difference between the original Manchurian Candidate and this remake, however, is one of tone: in 1962 director John Frankenheimer knew the political sensitivity of the material was suited to a style of blackly comical paranoia. The result was satire.
Without the grotesque humour that Frankenheimer invested in the original, the remake emerges a hybrid of psych-drama and political thriller which although certainly socio-political criticism in the guise of popular entertainment never becomes satire. But its not intended as such: the film is intended as an indictment of the ethics of the US War on terror, though fictionalized here as a willingness to deal with a man who sells his talents to terrorists for a price – the implant researcher as rogue scientist. This man, a doctor who possesses knowledge of secret mind control experiments, is the villain here – the prize purchase of Manchurian Global.
Corporate interest feeding from government-propelled fear-mongering is the thesis behind the remake of The Manchurian Candidate: thus, Manchurian Global hopes to create private armies to replace America troops, stretched thin by the War on Terror. Likewise, a puppet President allows them control of the political scene necessary to ensure their profit making in the War on Terror. The ethic Streep espouses here “ do what needs to be done”, would find tremendous resonance with subsequent terrorist films, which sought to deal with directly that sentiment: though from its original source, Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney announcing the need for strong measures to fight conscience-less terrorists. Streep would follow up by portraying a similar character in the 2007 political drama Rendition, also appearing for Robert Redford that year in Lions for Lambs, making her perhaps the most high profile actress in the post 9-11 cinema of terrorism.
