Director : Jonathan Demme Starring : Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Kimberly Elise

The Manchurian Candidate is Jonathan Demme's best film since Silence of the Lambs, an engrossing conspiracy thriller and a more than competent remake (unlike The Truth About Charlie, Demme's boofing of Charade).

It's also not the liberal screed that it has been painted; it's not The Contender (Frank Rich of the New York Times, responsible for a few left-diatribes himself, said he could not "recall when Hollywood last released a big-budget mainstream feature film as partisan as this one at the height of a presidential campaign."). Frankly (pun sort of intended), no, it's not. This Manchurian, unlike John Frankenheimer's still freaky, still blistering 1962 version, is a black-helicopter movie, one where the Art Bell crowd will wag their fingers at the screen and say, "Yep, I know'd it" instead of some damning indictment of the current administration or of our lobbyist-driven national agendas.

Manchurian is still about a squadron of soldiers who are lost for several days and return from the conflict (the Gulf War this time instead of the Korean War) agreeing on one thing above all, that they were saved by the efforts of one heroic man, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber, always good casting it seems). But in peacetime each man from the troop harbors doubts about what actually happened, and they're all plagued by bizarre dreams of capture and torture. Their captain, Ben Marco (Denzel Washington, in Frank Sinatra's shoes), can relay the story of their battle in the desert, but he can't bring himself to believe it, particularly the bit about the personally-repellant Shaw. When Marco is confronted by a nearly insane man from their company (the also-always-good Jeffrey Wright), who has a portfolio of crazed scribblings that eerily echo Marco's nightmares, the captain begins to dig deeper into their confused past.

Meanwhile Shaw is being preened for the vice-presidential spot on the national ticket by his overbearing, power-wielding mother, Senator Eleanor Shaw, superbly pulled off by Meryl Streep. She uses every means necessary to get her boy considered by the nominating committee even as he is being tailed by Marco, his former commanding officer, who insists that something other than the published story occurred.

The shadowy power player in this film is not some cabal of Communists who brainwash their prisoners in Manchuria, as in the first film, it's the powerful Manchurian Global, a private equity fund, the kind of company that provides the complimentary flights and accommodations for the World Trade Organization meetings. Their plan is to have, as Senator Shaw puts it, the "first privately owned and operated vice president of the United States" and Raymond is their man.

Demme stretches this film so tautly that a moment in the center of the film, where Marco socks an interrogator in the nose, produces laughs from the crowd that a sock in the nose really doesn't rate. Demme has them so strung out on tenterhooks that the theater desperately needs release and seizes the opportunity. With the exception of an ending that trails off rather than punches out, Demme is in complete control of this film (though there is also one Gertrude-Hamlet incest scene that draws away from his picture as a whole). His actors are in rare form too. Washington, who has been on a bank statement improvement plan recently, hasn't been this good since Training Day. Streep and Schreiber are pure class, pure conviction, and, as a political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate is top drawer, though the emphasis is on "thriller" not "political."

The politics take a backseat to the conspiracy-laden plot. Openly-aired Corporate Wars may indeed be our bleak speculative future but it's a less solid footing than Frankenheimer's Cold War reality. Manchurian Global becomes the Freemasons, or the Bilderberg Group in this context, an evil organization with Star Chamber powers that scheme and determine the Fate of the nations from some darkened war room. One of the ultimate schizophrenic fantasies, that someone has implanted a monitoring and control device in your head, is even given life in Candidate, in a very unnerving skull drilling sequence. All that's missing is someone mentioning fluoridated water.

The obvious secondary response to all this skullduggery is that Demme and troupe are creating the illusion of nonpartisanship, even though Al Franken, of all people, is tromping around as a cable news reporter, to throw people off. The notion that they're diverting the more rabid right-wing pundits with red herrings (something Rich suggested) is too tempting to ignore. Senator Shaw is a black pantsuit wearing power-broker, echoing the fierce and controversial Hilary Clinton, Senator from New York. Raymond Shaw is a young star on a spectacular rise (though this film must have wrapped before presidential nominee John Kerry picked the charismatic rising star Senator John Edwards as his running mate). Were the filmmakers throwing the dogs off of their trail to inveigle some subliminal message? What is that message?

If it is the warning flag about corporate America, it's made to seem rather ludicrous because of all the cloak and dagger stuff. It's also silly because it's coming from a media conglomerate, unless Paramount chairwoman Sherry Lansing is just as daft as former CNN chief Ted Turner, who recently decried the existence of big media conglomerates, after becoming a multi-millionaire by helping orchestrate and bolster the creation of one (Time-Warner).

Demme borrows a page from a number of recent satirical works, including the barrage of instant news reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, and the use of pageantry to sway the crowds used to great effect in Volker Schlondorrf's The Ogre. Much like the assassin at the end of the film, it's unclear what Demme is aiming to do. He's hit the target of making a great paranoid thriller but missed the mark of creating a trenchant, ironic, political film.