In the wake of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” this revamp of the 1962 classic starring Frank Sinatra feels more chilling than it would have just two months ago. Denzel Washington stars as Capt. Ben Marco, a veteran of the first gulf war plagued by nightmares of torture and murder, and haunted by the sense that his memory has been altered. While in the gulf, a member of his patrol, Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), had apparently saved the entire troop from enemy attack–and won the Medal of Honor for it–but did he really? When Shaw, with the help of his senator mother (Streep), becomes the vice presidential nominee, Marco begins to suspect that a shadowy multinational corporation, Manchurian Global, is pulling the strings and is about to put its war-hero puppet in the Oval Office. “I don’t think there’s anything more farfetched about this than what we’re reading in newspapers today,” says director Jonathan Demme, who terrified the country 13 years ago with “The Silence of the Lambs.” “Whether it’s the latest article about Halliburton or Bechtel or the Carlyle Group, there’s a lot of dubious activity going on. Billions of dollars are being made and, yes, lives are being lost. But what’s most disturbing about the intersection of big business, big science and big government is that we absorb all this information and go, ‘Oh, gosh, that’s spooky!’ And we don’t seem to do anything about it.”
When John Frankenheimer made the original “Manchurian” more than 40 years ago, the title referred to the Chinese government, and the evil force threatening the nation wasn’t corporate greed but communism. With the country fresh out of the McCarthy era, the film, based on the novel by Richard Condon, struck the rawest possible nerve. “There are images in that movie–a knife cutting into the American flag–that were shocking,” recalls Demme, who was 18 at the time. “It was the most iconoclastic American movie I’d ever seen.” It would also prove prophetic. Weeks after the film’s release, the country was thrust into the Cuban missile crisis and the movie was pulled from theaters. Thirteen months later, President Kennedy was killed. The film, which revolves around an assassination plot, stayed in the vault. When it was finally re-released in 1987, near the end of the cold war, it still freaked people out. Sinatra’s daughter Tina got an idea. “I sat in this dark theater in Westwood, I saw the response from that audience, and the next day I called Dad,” she says. He was all for the idea of remaking it, “but I was busy doing other stuff,” she says. “I didn’t act on it right away.” Two years later the Berlin wall fell, and the evil empire wasn’t so scary anymore.
In the decade that followed, Tina set the project up at Warner Bros., but it went nowhere. It was clear, though, that the Reds couldn’t be the bad guys. “The plan was always to develop the enemy within our own borders,” she says. “It seemed more frightening and conspiratorial–and the WorldCom and Enron scandals hadn’t even happened yet.” Nor had September 11. While it came close to killing the film for good, Tina, Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing and producer Scott Rudin ultimately decided that it was not the worst time to make “Manchurian,” but the best. “We talked a lot about those ’ 70s paranoid thrillers like ‘The Parallax View’ and ‘3 Days of the Condor’,” Rudin says. “We felt if we could achieve what those movies had, and do it with contemporary politics, we’d have something very special.”
The script by Daniel Pyne (“The Sum of All Fears”) and Dean Georgaris adds several major twists and updates the role of Raymond Shaw’s mother. In the original, Angela Lansbury played the domineering wife of a McCarthyesque senator. This time Eleanor Shaw is a senator in her own right, a terrifying embodiment of unchecked ambition and maternal affection. It’s a hell of a role, and Streep plays the hell out of it. “She’s just amazing,” says Washington. “As soon as I read the script I was like, that’s the best part. I want to be her.” So did a lot of people, but it’s hard to compete with Streep. “It’s a great thrill when a brilliant person gets to play a brilliant person,” Demme says. “Eleanor Shaw is the smartest person in the room wherever she goes, and I think that’s probably true of Meryl, too.” In fact, says Rudin, “I think this character is the closest Meryl’s ever played to herself.” Is that a compliment? Must be. “Actually,” Streep says, “it’s the closest to Scott Rudin that I’ve ever played.” In truth, she did have some models for the role. Just don’t ask her who they were. “Never mind,” she says, laughing. “Fox News would love if I were doing Hillary, but that’s so off the mark.”
The film, surprisingly, isn’t overtly partisan. “It’s a movie,” says Washington. “Are we going to change the way people vote? Is Michael Moore? I don’t know.” As it happens, the words “Democrat” and “Republican” aren’t even used in the film. “Is there really an enormous difference between the two?” Demme asks. “I view our major parties as corporate entities desperate to please stockholders, putting out the products they think most people will buy.” Demme says that they rushed postproduction on “Manchurian Candidate” to get it into theaters before the election. It’s not that they wanted to rock the vote–OK, maybe Meryl did–but that they wanted to rock the box office, and feared the public would be exhausted by politics come late fall. Besides, if they’d waited, they would have run a still greater risk: that truth would get even stranger than their fiction.
