The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

The Manchurian Candidate: 2004, dir. Jonathan Demme. Seen at Barton Creek/Cinemark (August 27).
The remake of The Manchurian Candidate is one of those movies that I liked while I was watching, and then afterwards I kept thinking of a million different plot holes and implausibilities. I did buy the initial premise of the movie, but I think I bought it because I bought it in the last movie. In other words, I believed that this stuff was true because it had been true for the last movie. Also, I hadn’t seen a Jonathan Demme movie in maybe 10 years, and noticing all the familiar directorial touches and the usual cameos (I caught Charles Napier but totally didn’t recognize Roger Corman or Tracey Walter) might have helped me believe the general premise of the movie.

I am stressing this point because my boyfriend did not buy any of it. He claimed that the movie lost him in the scene where Meryl Streep’s character bullies a back-room group into nominating her son for Vice President, rather than Jon Voigt. That was fairly unbelievable, I admit, but somehow I accepted it as a way of showing us just how tough and powerful Streep’s character was. (So why didn’t she run? I wondered that afterwards. If she was already in the pay of the bad guys, it would make more sense. I guess the answer is that she was too much of a loose cannon, not as easy to manipulate as a brainwashed person, but still.)
Once you start picking at the movie’s storyline, the whole thing falls apart. Manchurian Global (the contemporary movie’s substitute for Manchuria/China in the older version) has been described by other reviewers as a “Halliburton-esque” corporation but it’s not that clear-cut. We hear characters tell us how omnipresent and evil the corporation is but we can’t see it. I know that sometimes the most suspect companies are the ones that work as state and federal vendors and outside of that arena, they never display their logo or promote the company name. (I worked for a vendor like that once.) Still, this doesn’t play well in a movie.
However, I was pleasantly surprised by the remake. I was getting a little worried about Mr. Demme after he tried that remake of Charade, which I felt shouldn’t have been attempted. I wish he would return to comedy, and lighter movies, but not by remaking movies. The Manchurian Candidate has very little intentional humor, but it wasn’t too heavy-handed a drama. If you can get caught up in the movie and not think ahead or dissect the logic of what you are seeing, you can enjoy this movie.
The writers and director did a nice job of updating the storyline from the 1962 movie while at the same time changing enough plot elements to make the movie suspenseful for people who have seen the earlier movie. I particularly liked Rosie’s turning out to be a kickass FBI agent (which reminded me pleasantly of The Silence of the Lambs). I didn’t like the fate of Jocelyn and I thought that was unnecessary, but I suppose the point was to show that the brainwashing was so powerful that people would kill the ones they loved without a second thought.
That’s the problem with this movie. There are lots of events that occur for a reason that makes sense when you view the movie as a whole (this is foreshadowing, this is a setup for that later scene, and so forth) but which don’t make sense in terms of how the characters might naturally and logically act.
Also, there are a few too many red herrings and unanswered questions. If the chips in people’s shoulders didn’t control them, but it was the brain chip instead, why did they even put chips in their shoulders? Just to add to Denzel Washington’s paranoia? And so on.
Other things that were difficult to believe: Al Franken as a straight news reporter, an incumbent President from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (that’s not impossible, but I thought it was funny), an unmarried Vice Presidential character with a strong attachment to his mother, and the way Denzel Washington conveniently knew someone who could interpret the shoulder chip and help him recover his memory.
By the way, I couldn’t watch the scene with the brain chip maintenance. I don’t know when I became so squeamish, but I had to cover my eyes entirely. Not watching this scene does not affect your enjoyment of the movie, though. I don’t think I missed much.
The acting was excellent, although I felt Liev Schreiber’s character was too impersonal and impassive and, well, passive. We never learn much about him, and he doesn’t seem to get even the small opportunities to display his own character that were present in the 1962 film. A few more glimpses of what he might have been like if he hadn’t been so manipulated would have been helpful.
All in all, The Manchurian Candidate was an entertaining summer movie, a decent remake, but nothing I need to see again. If you can’t buy the premise fairly early in the film, you’re not going to like it much.
Aside: We saw this movie at a Cinemark theater in an effort to avoid that pre-show commercial hell at Regal Cinemas, aka “The 2wenty.” However, the tradeoff was that the movie started at least 20 minutes late after a long, long series of commercials and trailers. At least the commercials were the kind you see on TV and not the kind that would trigger headaches. But that’s not saying much for the theater chain. Hope I remember this the next time I consider seeing a movie at a Cinemark theater.