Bush whacked

IS JONATHAN DEMME’S THE Manchurian Candidate part of a concerted Hollywood effort to take down the Bush administration? Maybe. Highlighting the movie in July, New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote: "I cannot recall when Hollywood last released a big-budget mainstream feature film as partisan as this one at the height of a presidential campaign."

Even before the film’s arrival, a series of left-leaning documentaries, including Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, Super Size Me, Outfoxed, and Uncovered: The War on Iraq, had blazed a trail of anti-Bush sentiment, attacking the man, his policies, his record, and the culture he represents.

That pattern has continued this month with the release in New York of Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, a panegyrical account of the Senator’s tour of duty in Vietnam, and his contributions to the peace movement that followed. Some critics have dismissed the film as little more than an extended party political broadcast, but others believe it will have a shelf-life beyond November’s election.

While the voice of the Left has reverberated through the multiplexes, there has been barely a squeak from the Right. When asked where all the conservative documentarians were, the New York Post’s John Podhoretz said: "The (real) question is how is it that all of these films are getting made at once? And the reason is that the spigot opened, that funding was available, because people want to trash George W Bush, they want to trash the United States, they want to trash capitalism and they want to do it in a concerted fashion. I think they’re wrong, but the money is flying out of the chequebooks of liberal foundations."

Film-maker Jason Apuzzo believes Hollywood is seeking to influence the election not only with documentaries but also fictional films such as The Manchurian Candidate and John Sayles’ political satire, Silver City. In response he and Govindi Murty set up the Liberty Film Festival, Hollywood’s first celebration of conservative film.

The three-day event debuted on 1 October and featured sell-out performances of films such as Michael and Me, In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in the Word and Deed, and Celsius 41.11 (the temperature at which the brain begins to die), a counterblast to allegations made in Fahrenheit 9/11. Evidently it is not only Michael Moore who preaches to the converted. Whether Apuzzo is right, and Hollywood has put together a co-ordinated assault on Bush is a moot point. Individually, though, filmmakers have expressed their desire to sway voters. "People ask if we’re trying to affect the election. Absolutely yes," says Maggie Renzi, producer of Silver City, in which Chris Cooper plays a bumbling, Bush-like candidate for governor of Colorado.

Jonathan Demme was equally blunt at September’s Venice Film Festival. "Speaking as an American," he said, "I feel like our country is in a lot of trouble now. Our leaders have taken us in a really bad direction on so many levels, and I feel like our current leaders really want to own the world. There will be endless profits, and there will also be a sense at last of security and a relief from fear; because if we own and control the world, we won’t have to be afraid of being attacked anymore."

Later, I asked him if he made The Manchurian Candidate hoping that it would encourage people to look at the world differently in the run-up to the election. "On some level, yes. I do feel our film, in America today, functions as a voice of dissent in the creative realm. It’s definitely trading on an angry reaction to an abuse of power, an exploitation of soldiers, and profiteering by corporations."

When John Frankenheimer made the original Manchurian Candidate in 1962, the Cold War was heating up and Chinese and Soviet communists were the villains du jour. Today, with the collapse of communism, Demme dispenses with the Red Threat and makes a multinational corporation, Manchurian Global, the bad guy.

In the wake of the Enron and Halliburton scandals, this new Manchurian Candidate is as in tune with today’s zeitgeist as Frankenheimer’s was with his. Yet Demme is keen to position the film as a psychological thriller along the lines of his acclaimed hit The Silence of the Lambs, rather than as a political thriller.

In the film Denzel Washington plays Ben Marco, a veteran of the first Gulf War who discovers that the terrifying nightmares he has been having since returning home are the result of brainwashing. Meanwhile, his decorated comrade, Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schreiber), is running for the vice-presidency under the watchful eye of his ambitious mother Senator Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep). Unbeknown to her son, she has done a deal with Manchurian Global, and a chip has been implanted in his brain to make him the nation’s first privately owned and operated vice-president.

Unlike Frankenheimer’s blackly comic adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel, Demme’s take contains little humour and dispenses with the levels of irony which make the original such a head-spinning experience. But then, who needs irony when you have a backdrop of wall-to-wall news reports about unilateral invasions, problematical electronic voting machines in a presidential election and a corporation that fills its pockets with the profits from no-bid war contracts? It is all too eerily familiar and "now" to be ironic.

Demme says the film’s tone is actually less to do with the times than with his desire to make us feel, as well as think. Nonetheless, the anger he is trading on is to the fore in the film’s opening track, John Fogerty’s anti-Vietnam War protest song Fortunate Son. Its particular meaning is broadened by the fact it is sung by Haitian artiste Wyclef Jean, linking it to a country Demme has been in love with since he visited it in 1986, and which has suffered over the years from US interference (a subject touched on in The Agronomist, Demme’s documentary about murdered Haitian activist Jean Dominique). It is just one of the sources of the filmmaker’s anger.

"As an American, once you become aware of how we behave overseas - certainly Iraq is the most graphic, appalling example imaginable - as you start to learn, and I did learn through Haiti because I saw how we manipulate countries, once you become aware of that, it makes you an angry citizen. And people are getting angry."

Demme would obviously like the film to make an impact come election time, as, no doubt, would Paramount’s Sherry Lansing, a "loyal Democratic contributor," says the New York Times, and Streep, who shared the stage with Whoopi Goldberg at a Kerry-Edwards fundraiser.

But can a film have that much effect? While Demme believes films can change people’s consciousness on an individual level (he was turned against the Vietnam War by the documentary Far from Vietnam), he can’t remember a single instance where a film or a documentary has ever changed the course of history. Michael Moore is still trying, though. He has reportedly been in talks to screen Fahrenheit 9/11 as part of a three-hour, pay-per-view event on election eve. Titled Michael Moore’s Pre-Election Special, it will see the documentary book-ended by interviews with like-minded activist celebrities.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is certainly putting the wind up people. When it was released on DVD in America last month, World Ahead Publishing set up what it called a "DVD buy-back programme." Inspired by gun buy-back initiatives, said a press release, "the Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD Buy-Back program is designed to protect Americans from harm, especially young children who might accidentally slip this dangerous propaganda into the living room DVD player." This comes from an organisation which has just published Thank you, President Bush.

Despite its popularity, even Fahrenheit 9/11, which has grossed about $120 million, may not have much power to push the swingometer in the Democrats’ direction. A July study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center concluded that the movie reinforced the views of its audience, whether they agreed with its political point of view or not. "I think people have grown very leery of messages embedded in art or in so-called documentary," says Streep. "They’ve become very hardened and it’s more difficult to find people who are willing to listen."

Liev Schreiber admits that he (not so) "secretly" hopes nonetheless that The Manchurian Candidate will have an impact on voters. However, he adds that although he shares the film’s underpinnings, "artists should avoid political grandstanding as much as possible. If people are getting their politics from actors and films, they’re in a lot of trouble."

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would certainly appear to agree with this statement. Their latest film, Team America: World Police, uses Thunderbirds-like marionettes to rip apart the mindless clichés of the Jerry Bruckheimer action movie and lampoon the celebrity/politics bandwagon. No one is safe - North Korean despot Kim Jong Il, Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore and George Clooney all come in for a roasting, as Team America take on terrorists, conservatives and liberals alike.

Paramount Pictures allegedly chose the film’s 15 October US release date with the election in mind. But Parker and Stone insist that the main reason Team America is coming out then is that they have to start work on the new season of South Park.

"The first script was handed in before the Iraq war," Parker has said. "That idea of us being the world police is well before George Bush and will be there no matter who gets elected. We’ll still be the world police, and people will still be hating us."

Anyone hoping for a full-frontal satirical assault on Bush will be disappointed. He does not even appear in the film, although UN weapons inspector Hans Blix does. Parker has said that producer Scott Rudin and Paramount were pushing him and Stone to make the film more political by adding more real-life characters.

Stone has a message for anyone who might look to their film for political advice. "If you’re the kind of person who’s going to change your vote based on seeing our movie or seeing Michael Moore’s movie, you should not be voting. Please don’t vote."

Manchurian Candidate star Denzel Washington concludes: "I think we were deceived about weapons of mass destruction. I think we do need to keep an eye on big business. I think now, more than ever, it’s important for every American to vote. But it’s also important to make your own decision.

"In the end, that’s what The Manchurian Candidate is saying: think for yourself."

The world is watching.

• The Manchurian Candidate is released in the UK on 19 November.