The moviemakers have no inkling of how to approach these issues and neither do the mystified critics. The movie's nefarious private equity fund is referred to as "a huge corporation" in The New Republic, "a multinational corporation" in the Austin Chronicle and the Dallas Observer, "a Halliburton-like multinational corporation" in the Onion, a "global conglomerate" on FilmThreat.com, a "multinational conglomerate" in Slate, a "multinational defense conglomerate" in the New York Times, and a "multi-national corporate conglomerate" in the Oregonian. ("Why say 'gila monster' when you can say 'Godzilla'?" appears to be the operative theory.) Even the Wall Street Journal, for goodness' sake, calls it "a vast multinational corporation." (Isn't it odd that writers, of all people, wouldn't realize that different phrases have different meanings?)

Even sadder than the imprecision of the paranoia is the embracing of it: Slate finds compensation in the "dread that permeates" the movie, and of course all of the appreciative reviews could be keyed to the sentiment in Rolling Stone, that, with the villain changed into a "powerful corporation" "in the Halliburton-Tyco-Enron era," the climax "couldn't be timelier." Which is ironic, since, according to this Deal.com report, "Through the early part of the [current] decade returns had lagged and many [private equity] funds were in the red as valuations fell and it became increasingly difficult to exit investments." I take all this critical palaver simply to mean that the movie twitches with the same complacently ill-informed liberal anxiety that moves the critics. My point isn't that a writer should have to pass a course in business organizations to qualify as a movie critic, but that mainstream critics' field of endeavor is the art of narrative, not business or politics--if only they knew it!

I wouldn't be surprised if the moviemakers, and these critics, thought a private equity fund could make money by direct ownership of oil fields rather than by indirect investment in oil companies, and that having an automaton in the White House would free them from all restraints. But don't they think this has already happened, and yet somehow The Manchurian Candidate still comes across as far-fetched, and neither insightful nor prescient.

There's another critical reflex at work here: Meryl Streep is once again getting rave reviews, as a U.S. Senator from New York who serves as the bridge between business and government in the conspiracy. Streep does have spectacular comic technique, but not really a comic spirit. Watching her as the Machiavellian mother of the political dupe is like watching Joan Crawford in the role, if she'd had the emphatic vocal and gestural address of Rosalind Russell but her same hefty, smothering, deliberateness. Streep's delivery is amazingly varied and always shrewd in a highly theatrical idiom. You can't help but be impressed, and that's part of the problem.