![]() ![]() Coincidence? In the background of one scene, a comedian is on television, making jokes about the conglomerate Manchurian Global. We hear about a controversy about touch-screen voting machines and later of an election in which the winning candidate has 70 percent of the vote. Equally obvious is that powerful forces are behind placing him at the threshold of power.ĭemme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris set "The Manchurian Candidate" within a textured 21st century landscape, in which snatches of conversation, headlines and news snippets, overheard seemingly at random, create the impression of a mad, frenzied world. That's really where the movie begins, and so let's leave the story there. Meeting up with a veteran from his old unit, who is having identical nightmares, spurs Marco to start asking questions. The dreams seem real, but Marco tells himself he has Gulf War Syndrome and tries to ignore them. He dreams that Shaw's heroism never took place, that it was all a lie implanted in his head. Ever since, Marco has been plagued by recurring nightmares of being tortured and brainwashed in Kuwait. Washington plays Ben Marco, a career soldier who remembers Shaw from the Gulf and recommended him for the Medal of Honor. Engaging and forthright in public, he's strangely distracted in private and under the thumb of his ruthless mother (Meryl Streep), a powerful U.S. An upcoming presidential campaign - and a political party's need to seem tough on terrorism - allows for the ascendancy of a young congressman, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), a Gulf War veteran with a Medal of Honor to his credit. It takes place either in some near- future or alternate present in which America is simultaneously involved in several wars, and terrorist attacks are common occurrences in American cities. The film is one of the few Hollywood movies to directly address the fact that we're living in a post-Sept. The movie depicts a collective 21st century American nightmare, in which political, scientific and corporate power align to destroy the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - not by challenging them but by subverting them so utterly that no one even notices they're gone. Denzel Washington plays a man suffering from nightmares, but he's not the only one. As directed by Jonathan Demme, "The Manchurian Candidate" suggests the possibility of pandemonium, even in its quietest moments.īased on the 1962 Cold War classic, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Frank Sinatra, "The Manchurian Candidate" is updated to accommodate a whole new set of modern-day terrors and fantasies. Safe reality morphs without warning into something strange and menacing. Faces of friends become faces of enemies. "The Manchurian Candidate" is a fever dream of a movie, filmed in the hyper-real, kinetic style of nightmares. Starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. ![]()
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