A Review by Phil Calabro
2004, Paramount, Dir. Jonathan Demme - Starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Jeffrey Wright, Kimberly Elise, Jon Voight, Ted Levine, Miguel Ferrer, Bruno Ganz, Tom Stechschulte, Pablo Schreiber, Anthony Mackie, Dorian Missick, Jose Pablo Cantillo
There are plenty of aspects other than the conspiracy that make the Frankenheimer-helmed 1962 hit 'Manchurian Candidate' so amazing to watch. There's a tightly wound relationship between the audience and the characters, giving equal shares of time to each particular person in order to deepen our understandings of their troubles. We got an inside look of the mother-son relationship between Raymond and Ellie Shaw, the paranoid Capt. Marco and his strange love with Janet Leigh's character, and Raymond's love for his opponent's daughter. Fast-forward through 42 years - Paramount bought rights to the story, with the great Demme as director. But a change of heart takes place, and skews the once-great elements of the original into a contemporary thriller. Sure, it's exciting in spots, but there's little character development of our title character, and too much Denzel Washington. Demme forces excessive amounts of disturbing shots, those that he would assume pinpoint fear, but result in just making one cringe with boredom. Although there's some great performances in this, it's not thrilling or equitable to the original.
During the Gulf War, Capt. Ben Marco (Washington) and his brigade get caught in rapidfire from enemy combatants, and each soldier's account claims that Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Schreiber) saved all of their lifes on his own, and so Marco awards him with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now years later, Raymond Shaw is running as a vice-presidential candidate with his stubborn and cruel mother Sen. Ellie Shaw (Streep) running his campaign. All of a sudden, Marco and his remaining soldiers keep having the same dreams, which draw up ideas that they may have been brainwashed by a large corporation called Manchurian Global during that fateful night. Ben tries to do as much research as possible, and the more he learns, the more it draws back to a political motivation to put Raymond Shaw in the White House through any means - even through outright murder.
Denzel Washington is very convincing as the shell-shocked Ben Marco, through every little stutter and silly utterance that he makes. He stumbles across the place in a very suspicious manner, but only the audience knows that he's who to root for. It's very effective in some sense, but he steals too much limelight from Liev Schreiber, who masters the role of Raymond Shaw. Washington has roughly 80% of the total screentime, and it's actually unfair to the other characters who are not allowed to be developed or analyzed because the director is obsessed with one member's star power. But on the topic of Schreiber, not only does he look a lot like Laurence Harvey, he has the same quietly deranged personality that the character requires. He seems conscious about most everything he does, and he tries his best to resist his mother's evil grasp. Together with Streep, Schreiber does considerably well, but this incestuous feature is not highlighted. There's one character that bothered me beyond belief, which was Kimberly Elise's character of Rosie. Whereas Janet Leigh provided no real purpose other than a love interest, Rosie jumps in at the last minute as an essential part of the big twist ending. It's too forced, too offbeat - just unnecessary.
People who've read my reviews know I hate twist endings, but putting a twist ending in a good story like 'Manchurian Candidate' is a federal felony. It's a shame upon the screenwriters, who should've realized that the twist which finalized the original was just perfect, but they just can't take 'no' for an answer. Although I'm not really a fan of contemporizing screenplays, the writers did do a fairly interesting take on the story. No more actual Manchurians, but the name of a corporation, even though it makes no sense why it's called 'Manchurian Global'. Demme, a fan of pinpoint suspense as featured in 'Silence of the Lambs', makes every dream sequence as graphic as possible. The process of brainwashing features all the skull drilling and chip planting, just to get us twitching at the little tics the doctors do. In the end, it serves no purpose, and sheds no light on the reason of brainwashing.
'The Manchurian Candidate' is a tired, lackluster, and over-modernized take on such a great film - a shame upon Demme. Certainly Raymond Shaw is not his new Hannibal Lecter, but it's still a great performance on Schreiber's part, despite his limited screentime. All the potential of making this a big-budgeted masterpiece falls apart at the seams thanks to the overdoings of Denzel Washington and the contemporizing screenplay.
