Genre: thriller

The Manchurian Candidate

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Written by Daniel Pyne, Dean

Georgaris, based on George

Axelrods original script

and the novel by Richard Condon

Starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep and Live Shreiber

Classification:14A

Rating: ***

Director John Frankenheimer's 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate was a baroque, satiric, elegantly perverse paranoid thriller, about brainwashing, a presidential assassination and murky East-West dealings. Released a year before President John F. Kennedy was shot, and withdrawn from circulation for the next 25 years, it was re-released in 1988 to great retrospective acclaim.

All this -- the film's quality, historical timing and relatively recent rediscovery -- makes the idea of remaking The Manchurian Candidate seem foolhardy. In the era of George Dubya and post-Cold War American dominance, it sounds about as good an idea as remaking The Stepford Wives or Psycho. So here's the happy surprise: The Manchurian Candidate, directed by Jonathan Demme, is genuinely entertaining in its own right. Though not the masterpiece the original was, it is sharply executed and has enough election-year resonances and contemporary references to corporate malfeasance, terrorist threats and American military incursions around the globe to have some political charge as well.

Though it adheres to the structure of George Axelrod's original script, the new Candidate does not have the mothball smell of remake about it. If Demme's film is a throwback, it's not to the shadowy film style of the early 1960s, but to the muddle and paranoia of mid-seventies America, of corrupt big government and military-industrial manipulations in such films as The Parallax View and Winter Kills. Where the original Candidate was suave, strange and dream-like, the current one is sprawling and sweaty; with hot colours and loud sounds, it's the rock 'n' roll version of the first film's dissonant jazz.

Packed with strong performances and a literate script, it is rich in resonances torn from the headlines. The new paranoia comes from terrorists and big government. A presidential coup? (Didn't that already happen in Florida?) A cue-card-reading robotic president placed in power by corporate interests? Just imagine.

With no more Cold War to blame, Demme and his screenwriters have deftly updated the story, placing it not in the present, but the near future. In 2008, Gulf War veteran Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) is a pill-popping mess, suffering from recurrent nightmares about a former army friend, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), who is now a congressman for an unnamed party, a rising political figure with hawkish views. The radio and television informs us of a series of U.S. interventions in countries from Indonesia to Guinea, pre-emptive strikes against governments that threaten American supremacy.

Shaw's senator mother, Eleanor (Meryl Streep) has manipulated her party into pushing him for vice-presidential candidate, at the expense of his more experienced and statesman-like rival Tom Jordan (Jon Voight). Shaw came out of the Gulf as a war hero, apparently responsible for saving the lives of Marco and his entire company in a night ambush in Kuwait, and he promises a get-tough policy in world affairs.

Now Marco travels about giving motivational speeches to young recruits about Sergeant Shaw's achievements, but at night, he's haunted by dreams of torture and brainwashing. When he encounters an emotionally disturbed soldier from his platoon, Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright), who has similar dreams, he begins to wonder what actually happened and begins trying to contact Shaw.

Since the Chinese were the brainwashers in the original film, how do we justify the title? The answer is to create a company, Manchurian Global (read Halliburton), which sells military supplies to the government at inflated prices and is looking to create the first privately owned and operated vice-president. Instead of the Alice in Wonderland world of the original film's dreams (where the soldiers found themselves amidst society ladies at a garden tea and Red Army agents), we have sliding walls and doctors injecting microchips in brains.

Demme, working in territory similar to his most successful psychological thriller, Silence of the Lambs, uses visual effects well but sparingly. Marco's delusions seem real, and occasionally, what we think are delusions -- an implant in his back -- turn out to be real.

As in the original, the story's strength depends on the originality of the characters, almost none of whom is exactly what they seem to be. Washington, in the central role originated by Frank Sinatra, walks an ambiguous line between a man who may be either delusional or the victim of an improbably vast conspiracy. Kimberly Elise, as the mysterious young woman who picks him up on a train, has a small but memorable role.

Schreiber, in the role originated by Laurence Harvey, is the robotic candidate who hides his torment under an exterior of brusque pleasantries, somehow suggesting both George W. Bush stiffness and the wounded emotional paralysis of a child-abuse victim. For good measure, the great German actor Bruno Ganz pops up as one of those helpful scientists who explain things to the hero in thrillers.

Truly, though, the performance that dominates the movie belongs to Streep, who reprises the role indelibly played by Angela Lansbury in the original. Streep takes fewer film roles these days, and each time she does reminds us that her talent is often too big for the movies that are currently being made.

Streep's performance as a patriotic monster is over the top, but entertainingly so. Her villainous excesses are one signal that the movie is not to be taken entirely seriously.

Part patrician WASP, part Lady Macbeth and revealing more than a little of Hilary Clinton steel, Streep crackles with neurotic energy and barely checked sexuality, sublimated into an addiction to power and an unhealthy devotion to her son. In the end, you don't know whether to hiss the character or cheer the performance, though it doesn't much matter. Corporate balance sheets and computer chips are hard to hate, but in the mental muddle of the movie's political intrigue, she gives us the satisfaction of a complex enemy.