Random Late Summer Notes: Blah Blah Blah - Page 5

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.

Streep lacks the shameless, caricatural quality Angela Lansbury brings to the role in the original. Lansbury doesn't play a character in a realistic sense but outlines the grotesque creature, and her very distance from the part she's outlining with such bravura becomes the center of the aesthetic experience. In short, a witty but indelicate irony is central to Lansbury's performance. Streep, by contrast, isn't trying to be grotesque and is too conscious a craftswoman for irony. She's such a scrupulous realist that she's quite convincing as a tough politico. But she's so plausible in the scene in which she has to win the vice-presidential nomination for her son that you can't imagine what greater edge she's hoping for by implanting a computer chip in his brain. (She shows too much relish for winning the old-fashioned way.)

Remember, too, that when Lansbury bustles and squawks as the woman behind the numbskull vice-presidential candidate, the character is consciously playing a role. Streep, by contrast, is straightforwardly strong in and out of the conspiracy, and the script has the lady senator being openly supported by the bad guys, whom she confers with in public. In this way Streep moves closer to Lansbury's untwisted performance in Frank Capra's straight-up political melodrama State of the Union (1948), and her faults are only accentuated by the movie's earnestness, although the director Jonathan Demme does cut her scenes to enhance her timing. (Streep at least rouses you from your torpor, which is more than you can say for Denzel Washington, giving one of his numb-lipped, downcast-idealist performances.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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