Remake of 'Manchurian Candidate' loses its way in the end

John Frankenheimer's 1962 Cold War classic, "The Manchurian Candidate," was part paranoid-thriller, part sophisticated political satire and part prescient social commentary that eerily predicted America's loss of innocence in the later '60s.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

CAST: Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber

RUNNING TIME: 135 minutes

RATING: R for violence

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, Everett 9, Factoria, Galaxy Tacoma 6, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Guild 45th, Issaquah 9, Kirkland Parkplace 6, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza 12, Redmond Town Center, Renton Village, Valley Drive-in, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B-

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It's also a film whose legend grew to monumental proportions in the 24 years it was withheld from the public by its producer-star, Frank Sinatra, who was embarrassed by the common belief that its climactic sequence inspired Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy.

How does one remake a film so multileveled, so steeped in pop culture mythology, so tied to the nuances of its own particular era and the personal style of its director? Obviously, not very easily. In fact, it's a suicide mission if there ever was one.

Yet Jonathan Demme comes tantalizingly close to pulling it off. Before it self-destructs in its convoluted final act, the film is an astute, genuinely gripping thriller that speaks shrewdly to our current corporate-phobia and post-9/11 paranoia.

Based on a novel by Richard Condon, the original film dealt with an impossibly intricate plot by the Communists to seize power in America by using a brainwashed former Korean War POW to elevate their own man to the U.S. presidency.

Here, the story is strikingly the same, except the political candidate (Liev Schreiber) is a Gulf War vet, his behavior is modified by a computer chip instead of weird psychological conditioning and the "Manchuria" controlling him is not a section of China.

And Demme, working with a new script by Daniel Pyne, has skewed its sensibility away from Cold War paranoia toward a one-dimensional thriller with the same anti-Bush, anti-corporate, anti-war mindset as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."

In the process, he gets a career-best performance from Schreiber as the off-putting but strangely sympathetic title character and a successful change-of-pace turn by Denzel Washington as his meek, troubled, former commanding officer nemesis -- the audience point of view.

However, very surprisingly, Meryl Streep is not wonderful as Schreiber's scheming, incestuously possessive mother. She gobbles up all the scenery but, for whatever reason, she's just not half as chilling a portrait of demented mother love as the original's Angela Lansbury.

And while Demme brings off several key scenes and gives the story enough contemporary relevance to be fairly engaging, the effort shows: it is labored and simply doesn't have the free-flowing inevitability and stylistic unity of its model.

Above all, the film ends badly. In general, it becomes weaker and more muddled as it moves along, and by the time we get to the climax (and a big, left-turn from the original) it's all become so opaque and confusing that the piece loses most of its unsettling impact.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.