The Manchurian Candidate: a review.

Definitely see it, but beware of its limits.

To complete a great day, Kev and I tonight saw the remade The Manchurian Candidate, and found it entertaining, but structurally and thematically flawed; I do, however, highly commend it to your viewing, as explained below. The Freudian-Oedipal theme was WAY over-presented; up to a certain point in the film it was nicely hovering, then it was simply beaten into the audience. Throughout, there was a sense of genre-confusion: the film was trying at various points to be a sci-fi thriller, a political thriller, a psychological thriller - but little successful grafting of these kinds. While there were obvious political allusions to the current situation (the Senator with the Rodhamesque coiffure named "Eleanor," the rhetoric of "Secure Tomorrow," the tenuous middle between blue and red), on the whole I did not find that they cohered sufficiently to make the film's chief point clearly. Thus, the point itself was obscured: something along the lines of "This is the politics of War on Terror gone awry," without a clear identification of whether the problem is a zealously ideological right (at best hovering at the film's periphery), a fratricidally confused left, or simply the military-geocorporate-geopolitical complex itself.
   Whatever judgment of the present situation and its actors the film was attempting, it would have been made much more convincingly if the theme of the US military's ambivalence vis-à-vis its dual parents, the geocorporate and geopolitical worlds of US empire. Then, the Freudian drama among Rep. Raymond Prentiss Shaw (ably played by Liev Shreiber), his mother, Sen. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (a wicked performance by Meryl Streep), and his father-surrogate, Maj. Bennet Marco (Denzel Washington, beautiful and engaging as always) would function much more strongly as the metaphor it strained to be. The performances were well done by each lead, but unevenly matched.
   Nevertheless, given these shortcomings, I strongly urge thoughtful people to see it. For, in my judgment, what it nailed perfectly was what a long-term politics of The War on Terror would look, feel, and sound(bite) like in the US. And that is something voters need to be able to envision as much as any scenario of a terrorist attack or electoral nightmare.

(Note: There was one minor technical flaw in the script that I hasten to note. At one point, Meryl Streep's character threaten's to ensure another US Senator is "impeached on the floor of the Senate." Members of Congress are, of course, not impeachable, but rather can be ejected by a two-thirds vote of their respective houses, as Article I, §5 of the US Constitution provides.)