Manchurian Remake
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Manchurian Remake From liberal anti-communism to liberal lunacy. BY JOHN PODHORETZ There's never been a movie remotely like the old version of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film starring...
...Fifty-seven," she replies, while staring at a bottle of Heinz steak sauce...
...And, according to Ellie, it gives out untold millions to politicians across Washington...
...McCarthy, called John Yerkes Iselin in the 1962 film, is a moronic drunk...
...But JFK was politically horrendous and nonetheless remained a spectacular feat of cinematic storytelling...
...Manchurian makes the voting machines that, we learn, are already stealing elections...
...The film suggests that the choice for vice president is neck and neck between this guy, who makes Michael Moore look like John Ashcroft, and the tough-on-terror Raymond Shaw...
...I'd be a lot happier if we could just settle on the number of Communists I know there are in the Defense Department," Iselin whines to his wife...
...In the imaginings of Demme and his screenwriters, the United States is to blame for the war on terror...
...The movie posits that her son must be the one to rise because he was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor—an award he was given when the evil corporation hijacked his platoon during the 1991 Gulf War and brainwashed them all into believing he saved them...
...The film is like a comic-book illustration of every single liberal-left cliche of the era after the attacks of September 11...
...Ann Coulter, it turns out, is the al Qaeda agent...
...In the original, Raymond is a sergeant during the Korean War...
...Raymond and his platoon are also brainwashed into believing that the son performed exploits worthy of a Congressional Medal of Honor, but only to provide cover for the murder of the soldiers—whom the brainwashers have Raymond kill to prove his effectiveness...
...Whittaker...
...In the new version, which has been updated to the present, the evil Ellie (played by Meryl Streep) is now a conservative senator in her own right...
...Unfortunately, there have been a lot of movies like the new version of The Manchurian Candidate...
...And she is the secret agent for a corporation modeled on Dick Cheney's old employer, Halliburton...
...And they did...
...His platoon is targeted by the North Koreans because the Chinese specifically want to turn him into an assassin...
...It sends privately funded armies to spell exhausted American troops...
...The sequence is funny until it's not funny—until it becomes horrifying, that is, when Raymond Shaw calmly and without expression obeys an order to pick up a gun and shoot a fellow platoon member through the head...
...Only Ellie's not so secretly an agent, because the corporation (called Manchurian Global) is her biggest campaign contributor...
...There's no husband in sight...
...The new Manchurian Candidate is neither sophisticated nor satirical—but it sure is political...
...The movie never bothers to explain why the evil Manchurian Global Corporation would have to go to all the trouble to brainwash people and try to install its own robot as president when, according to the movie, it's already running the planet...
...It was, by turns, a paranoid thriller, a dysfunctional family melodrama with more than a hint of incest, a horror film, and the blackest of black comedies...
...Where exactly is the paranoid-thriller twist in the notion of a right-wing senator doing favors for a corporation...
...That, to put it mildly, makes no sense, even for a paranoid thriller...
...The critics who praise it—and most critics seem to be falling all over themselves to worship at its feet—are doing so because they like its politics and are entirely willing to overlook the degree to which it is a creative calamity...
...John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The new movie is absurdly solemn...
...In the original film, the terrifying effectiveness of the brainwashing is demonstrated when a platoon of American soldiers sits calmly listening to Soviet and Chinese party members having a discussion about them—all the while imagining that they are in the presence of a ladies' garden club in New Jersey...
...It turns out that he is the unwitting Soviet dupe...
...In what universe...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ There's never been a movie remotely like the old version of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra...
...Raymond has been given a suitcase nuclear bomb...
...Once it is detonated, the John Ashcroft character will be the next president—and he will then capitulate to the worldwide Islamist conspiracy...
...He says the United States deserved what it got because of twenty years of illegal actions abroad...
...We need to look inward," he tells his party's convention...
...Imagine, too, that Ann Coulter has a son named Raymond who went to war in Iraq, was briefly kidnapped, and escaped while saving the lives of others...
...In their eyes, Yen Lo the brain-washer is an elderly fat woman named Mrs...
...But why couldn't Ellie be the vice-presidential nominee herself...
...And second, there's no reason for Manchurian Global to hijack an entire platoon of people to brainwash Raymond...
...The movie is a cinematic exploration of the liberal anti-Communist complaint about McCarthy: His actions so discredited honest anti-communism that McCarthy might just as well have been working for the Soviets...
...In one stunning moment, we get a look through the eyes of a black platoon member...
...Even more, it's like the hundreds upon hundreds of Bush-hating ads on the website MoveOn.org...
...They wanted to make a movie that blames Halliburton for the world's ills...
...The plot was the inspiration of Richard Condon, the novelist who all but invented the paranoid thriller...
...Imagine the first movie's McCarthy character, but now morphed into the John Ashcroft of liberal fantasy—locking up librarians, trampling on civil rights, all in the name of the war on terror...
...Whittaker is a hefty black woman...
...What a waste...
...But they didn't want to make a movie in which al Qaeda was a villain...
...It's really too bad that director Jonathan Demme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, the men responsible for the remake, didn't take Yen Lo's advice...
...Imagine that he is a widower, married to a fictionalized older version of Ann Coulter...
...The first Manchurian Candidate is ideologically unclassifiable...
...First of all, you don't need a Congressional Medal of Honor, as we know, to get to the White House...
...Yen Lo, the Manchurian brainwasher who turns the evil wife's son into a mindless assassin, speaks for Frankenheimer and Axelrod when he smilingly upbraids a fellow Commie conspirator: "You must try, Comrade Zilkov, to cultivate a sense of humor...
...On that night, Ashcroft is the cabinet member selected to journey to an undisclosed location lest there be a massive terrorist attack that wipes out the entire government...
...They could kidnap him off the streets of Washington and put an implant in his head without involving twelve other people whose brainwashing starts to wear off pretty soon after they come back from Kuwait...
...That means the people in Hollywood probably thought of it too...
...His wife Ellie is the Soviet agent who controls him—and the Communists decide diabolically to bind her more closely to them by turning her son Raymond Shaw into a brainwashed assassin who will ensure his hated stepfather's ascension to the presidency...
...There's nothing like a good laugh now and then to lighten the burdens of the day...
...It makes vicious fun of Joseph McCarthy's Red hunt inside the American government, while at the same time positing a worldwide Communist conspiracy so immense and effective that it is seeking to place an unwitting Soviet dupe in the White House...
...It's a pretty close parallel to the original, and I thought of it in about ten minutes...
...Senator Ellie doesn't try to install a husband as vice president, but rather her son Raymond (Liev Schreiber...
...This we learn from the speech by the saintly liberal senator (played by Jon Voight) that opens the film...
...But the incredible wit and panache with which it was executed are due entirely to the crisp direction of John Franken-heimer and razor-sharp screenplay by George Axelrod...
...That's not the case with the new Manchurian Candidate...
...The original Manchurian Candidate was, in the words of Pauline Kael, "the most sophisticated political satire ever made in this country...
...What's worse, it is also ill-conceived, and I don't say this because I dislike its politics—though I do, God knows...
...Starring Denzel Washington, it is an amalgam of The X-Files, Oliver Stone's JFK and Nixon, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and a forgotten 1974 film called The Parallax View...
...In which party...
...There would have been a way to remake The Manchurian Candidate that would have retained both the liberal sorrow and the worldwide-conspiracy worries that made the original film so bracing...
...He's only a congressman, while she's a senator...
...On the night of the State of the Union, Raymond is to be saluted by the president as he sits next to the first lady in the Capitol Building...
...his Mrs...
Vol. 9 • August 2004 • No. 45
