A new incarnation that works well | The Manchurian Candidate (Widescreen Edition)

DVD: The Manchurian Candidate (Widescreen Edition) | Jeffrey Wright, Pablo Schreiber

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	• The Manchurian Candidate (Widescreen Edition) Jeffrey Wright, Pablo Schreiber Paramount, 2004 average customer review:based on 203 reviews view larger image
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Nice

A great paranoic flick. I want 2 see the original flick with Sinatra now. Denzel Washington is perfect in that role.

A new incarnation that works well

Manchurian Candidate is closer to the original, at least in spirit, than might be expected. But it's not the exact movie, and it hardly could have been. The relevance of the original to today's events counts little to an audience with little sense of history, and that has a hard time drawing meaning from any social context out of its experience. One glimpse of black and white films stock, men in felt brim hats, and cinematic conventions from an earlier era, and most teenyboppers under the age of thirty grab for the remote. Since they will only sit through a first run, it is good that they have one. Fortunately, the update stands on its own.

The new is less dialog-driven, which tends to make it less literate. But this film runs more on mood than on dialog, and Jonathon Demme's just-barely-odd framing and pacing provoke discomfort on a subliminal level. It is not cozy, and is laid out with less detailed explanation. The resulting sense of uncertainty may also be part of why the film is not universally liked.

The remake does solve some of the problems of the first. Gone are the swarthy, vaguely foreign-looking actors standing in for Russians and Chinese agents. Gone are the poorly choreographed ju-jitsu moves that might provoke giggles in a present day audience, used to world-class martial artists on screen, and the multi-racial world commonly reflected on film now, vs the early 1960's.

The new film retains the acting strengths of the original. Every performance is fine. Liev Schrieber's work is worthy of Laurence Harvey's original, a gut kicking performance, though Harvey still holds the edge. Washington's craft is more than a match for Sinatra's unevenly inspired work. (One of the wonders of the first is realizing that Sinatra -could- act, that he did things with rhythm and cadence because those were his only tools, and it worked. He was no method actor, but he very much had something going on.) Streep's scenery chewing is, frankly, perfect. Because unfortunately, really disgusting people actually do exist, and in positions of power. And unlike an actor's performance, criticism of real public figures whose behavior is over-the-top are rarely heard. Seen any Fox commentators recently? Streep's Senator Shaw may well be over-the-top, but the only thing that distinguishes her from the real thing is that she is only playing the role, not embodying it every day of her life.

Make no mistake, both original and remake are thrillers in the paranoid vein, and the overly literal person will likely say of either, "preposterous" -- though the original is a classic. But the literal representation of reality is not what movies are ever about, and such criticisms fail to register with me.

So is this as excellent a film as the original, adjusting for the times in which each was made? No, but it is a good film. It hits in the right places, horrifies us with an incredibly cynical vision of what our nation is becoming, and yet it is offset by the thinnest sliver of a wild, earnest Patriotism.

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A Gulf war hero is brainwashed and used as a tool in a political conspiracy.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 30-JAN-2007
Media Type: DVD