Film Is a Battleground #4 (Before Sunset, The Manchurian Candidate)

originally published August 12, 2004

BEFORE SUNSET (in theaters)
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (in theaters)

BEFORE SUNSET (Richard Linklater, 2004)
**** (Masterpiece)

The last two films Richard Linklater has written and directed, WAKING LIFE and BEFORE SUNSET, have returned him to the subject matter and aesthetic of his first released feature, SLACKER. (Criterion’s upcoming DVD of SLACKER will include Linklater’s first, unreleased film, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN TO PLOW BY READING BOOKS.)

WAKING LIFE expanded on the pop-philosophical arias of SLACKER by centering its characters’ theorizing on the relationships between waking and sleeping life, dreams and reality, life and death.

All of Linklater’s films, excepting his two studio features, THE NEWTON BOYS and SCHOOL OF ROCK, consist of characters taking stock of their lives in the context of long conversations about what they could have/should have done and can/should do. In BEFORE SUNRISE (written by Linklater and Kim Krizan), one such conversation between two characters, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), constitutes the entire movie. BEFORE SUNSET (written by Linklater, Krizan, Hawke and Delpy) consists of the next conversation between those characters, but unlike SUNRISE, and like SLACKER, this conversation takes place in real time within a series of very long takes.

In BEFORE SUNRISE, Jesse and Celine’s conversation was occasionally interrupted by other denizens of the Viennese night. These strangers made assumptions about the two near-strangers, forcing them to explain and define their burgeoning relationship to the strangers and each other as it was developing. On the occasion of their first meeting, they needed help from these outsiders to move their own conversation forward. In BEFORE SUNSET, once Jesse and Celine meet again, they talk almost without interruption. The events of that night in Vienna nine years ago and the failed meeting six months later continue to inform their lives. At this point they only need to define their relationship with each other for themselves.

Sympathetic audience, depending on their sensibility, members saw the ending of BEFORE SUNRISE, with the new lovers making a plan to exchange no personal information but to meet again six months later, as either beautifully hopeful or beautifully hopeless. We learn that Jesse and Celine now view the plan ruefully, as a youthful folly. To make a naïve statement about the nature of love, they sacrificed knowing each other. At that point in their lives, they knew mostly what they didn’t want to be. Despite having lived and matured through unsatisfying relationships (Celine is now dating a photojournalist who works primarily in war zones, Jesse is married and has a child. Neither is particularly happy.), they cannot let go of the memory of the one special night they shared. The tension of BEFORE SUNSET concerns how their combined, accrued knowledge of the nature of life and the nature of themselves will decide the outcome their second meeting. As they tell each other of their lives in the intervening nine years, they postpone answering the question of whether their meeting offers an opportunity for an ending or a beginning. The decision, now, carries more weight. It offers both more hope (an escape from lives that have become routine) and more sadness (breaking ties with their current partners). The ending, beautifully rendered, acknowledges both of these conflicting elements completely.

A great, modern romantic triple feature could be constructed out of BEFORE SUNRISE, BEFORE SUNSET, and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. This bill would provide thrills both aesthetic and emotional and the rare opportunity to experience sentiment and self-respect simultaneously.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (Jonathan Demme, 2004)
** (Worth seeing)

It’s difficult to fully engage with Demme’s MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE while watching it. Familiarity with the original makes the differences between the two films clear and triggers the analytical portion of the mind to ponder the reasons for the changes. The holy moment proves elusive.

After time and upon reflection, Demme’s achievement becomes clearer. While maintaining the premise of the original film (and Condon’s novel) he has re-conceived the particulars so as to reflect its contemporary setting. Frankenheimer’s version (much credit due to George Axelrod’s script) managed to be equally adept in functioning as a thriller, a comedy, and an existential drama. It was, in some ways, both the last film noir and the first film of the 1970s. It struck a nerve at the time of its release, seemed disquietingly prophetic in retrospect, and has remained politically and aesthetically relevant for forty years.

The stature of Frankenheimer’s film makes this a different sort of project than THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, Demme’s remake of CHARADE. Stanley Donen’s film was a delightfully breezy vehicle built upon the unique foundation of talent and charisma possessed by both Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Most critics lazily dismissed Demme’s delightful version because it lacked the presence of Grant and Hepburn. They missed or ignored the relaxed beauty of Demme’s original, multi-ethnic, and modern version (had Pauline Kael lived to review THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE she would have most definitely judged it “funky”) simply because it differed from the original.

Demme has received more respectful reviews for his update of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. The current political environment makes it more difficult to pretend films don’t have meaning. Complaints by a number of critics have been made about the scarcity of laughs in Demme’s version. Though still satirical, Demme’s film, unlike the original, is not a comedy. Frankenheimer and Axelrod satirized ideology, especially its literal, absurd application to a complex world. Demme satirizes, chillingly, the behavior of individuals (media, corporate executives, politicians, handlers, military officers, and government employees) as they consolidate the power of the institution which employs them. Comedy requires the existence of a norm to violate. Demme makes clear that corporate behavior, with the inherent organizational protections which deny individual responsibility, occurs in an amoral vacuum. The ability to withhold information, the ability the disseminate fabrications as truth, and human beings are transformed by the villainous corporation, Manchurian Global (an amalgamation of The Carlyle Group, Halliburton, and the Defense Policy Board), from truth, lies, and lives into assets.

Prolonged exposure to this moral vacuum deadens Bennett Marco’s (Denzel Washington) spirit. Forgoing the macho posturing of TRAINING DAY, Washington withholds his charisma from the audience. It’s his best performance since HE GOT GAME. Washington’s egoless willingness to appear blank and lost for the greater good of the film is reminiscent of Warren Beatty’s best work. In fact, the tone of this MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE owes less to the original than it does to Alan J. Pakula’s THE PARALLAX VIEW. Like Beatty’s reporter in that film, Washington suffers from the crushing discovery that the world he knows exists within a greater, more powerful world he does not understand and cannot control. The dark metaphor of Pakula’s film--that obsessive pursuit of paranoia leads not to destruction by madness, but to destruction by enlightenment--haunts Demme’s version of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as well.

It’s very much a post-Vietnam, post-assassination, post-Watergate manifestation of American culture that the private truths are so much worse than the worst of our imaginings that to know them would force cataclysmic ruptures in one’s relationship with the world. Contrast that with the early 20th Century Progressives who believed that reconciling public postures with private truths would serve to better society. Perhaps the difference exists because those of us who have benefited from the industrial and post-industrial explosion of American wealth find it less and less possible to imagine a life without the pacification of both material and intellectual comforts.

Liev Schreiber’s performance as Raymond Shaw, the titular candidate, suggests the latter. More recognizably and movingly human than Laurence Harvey’s wickedly affectless Shaw in the original, Schreiber’s vulnerability to manipulation stems from an incapability to extract himself from the life of power and privilege into which he was born. In fact, his one attempt to leave that world, by joining the Army, triggers the decision to “improve” him without his knowledge or consent.

As the one making the final, constrictive decision regarding Shaw’s future, Meryl Streep gives an electric performance. Oft-criticized in her younger days for elevating technique (though exquisite) over feeling (never absent), Streep has, over the last fifteen years, given a number of exciting, relaxed, and fully human performances in films of widely varied type and quality: SHE-DEVIL, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, DEATH BECOMES HER, THE RIVER WILD, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, ONE TRUE THING, ADAPTATION, and ANGELS IN AMERICA. Streep carried some of those films (some further than they deserved to be carried), worked in tandem with Albert Brooks, Clint Eastwood, and Shirley MacLaine, or as part of an ensemble with equal distinction. She has amassed a body of work to envy.

With his three leads working at such a high level, Demme surrounds them with a panoply of skilled character actors. Jeffrey Wright, Jon Voight, Miguel Ferrer, and Bruno Ganz stand out in their featured roles.

I’ve never been especially troubled by the existence of remakes. Granted, most are of negligible value, but I fail to see how their existence diminishes the original films. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE has value because it respects the source of its inspiration without slavishly replicating it. The result is akin to Godard’s early crime films, or De Palma’s use of Hitchcockian tropes. Jonathan Demme uses another artist’s material as the basis for creating an original, personal film as relevant, politically and aesthetically, as Frankenheimer’s.