It's now time to enter the strange new world of the Pointless Remake. At the best of times, a remake is a chance for a director to take a work that is in the public consciousness and put there own spin on it (as was the case with Cukor's A Star Is Born, Coppola's Dracula and Jackson's King Kong). There are other times that remakes are obvious cash-ins (as was the case with 1976 version of Kong and Devlin and Emmerich's Godzilla. And then there are some that seem to have no logical reason for there existence, films that audiences were not clamoring for but got made anyway. This category includes Gus Van Zant's Psycho, Paul Schrader's Cat People, and Neil La Butte's The Wicker Man. Jonathon Demme's The Manchurian Candidate also falls into the third category.
On the most basic level, the broad outlines of the Frankenhiemer classic would make a good movie- a man is brainwashed into assassinating someone without ever knowing there is anything wrong. However, Demme has not just taken this narrative hook and built a new story around it, but taken many themes and characters from the original. Although this is not a shot for shot remake a la Psycho, there is enough similarity that we run into the same problems with the Van Zant film - we can't stop comparing the new film to the original, and almost every comparison is lost because you can't see the movie in its own right. For example, Denzel Washington is a better actor than Frank Sinatra, but Washington can't play Sinatra better than Sinatra can.
Watching Demme's remake is boring and tedious, because we no exactly what is going to happen. There are differences, of course: the party in question is now supposed to be the Democrats and instead of the Republicans, the original war is the Iraq I instead Korea, and the villains behind the scheme are different (the movie wants it to be a surprise, but unfortunately it's given away in the title if you pay attention). Demme is so intent on being loyal to the original that some of the action is difficult to believe. Political conventions are hugely different now then they were in the 60's but you would never know that from this movie.
Of course, all of the above is only true if you have seen the original. Maybe if I had come into this film cold I might have been caught up in the movie anyway, but I doubt it. The movie still has some crucial pacing issues. What is missing most from the original is the atmosphere- that vague notion that something is very, very wrong gives way to Demme's declarations that something is REALLY, REALLY wrong.
I have not seen much of Demme's work but he made the excellent Silence of the Lambs, so he's obviously talented. But why make this film, when the original was a complete thought and there was little else that was necessary to say?
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)