The Manchurian movie

The apolitical political thriller
Reporters were often the protagonists of these ’70s thrillers, but the more glamorized they got in real life, the less ready-made they were for the role of cinematic heroes. Meanwhile the notion of a decent populist leader — as in “Z” and “Parallax” — became laughable to a cynical population. When Brian de Palma made “Blow Out” (1981), his spin on Antonioni’s “Blow Up,” the villain is, yes, a G. Gordon Liddy-like rogue plumber working for the establishment, but the opposition leader is a man who dies in a Chappaquiddick-like car crash. He’s not a shining knight; he’s a scoundrel sniffing for nookie.

So if the outside leader was now corrupt, where was the decency? Nowhere, apparently. In “No Way Out” (1987), Gene Hackman plays the Secretary of Defense who accidentally kills his mistress and then tries to cover it up; Kevin Costner plays the subordinate in charge of a phony investigation which will lead — he knows — back to himself, an innocent man. Except he’s not innocent. In the final reel we find out he’s a Communist spy.

“There’s no cause worth fighting for, Frank,” John Malkovich’s chilling assassin tells Clint Eastwood in “In the Line of Fire” (1993). “All we have is the game. I’m on offense, you’re on defense. [And] the clock’s ticking.” “Fire” is one of the better post-’70s political thrillers yet it still exemplifies how apolitical these movies have become. Malkovich’s assassin is ex-CIA. He killed for us and now he’s after the President of the United States. It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost — as Malcolm X said of the JFK assassination — but the film glosses over this message in place of ... the game. Eastwood saves a president who is a blank slate. What matters is Eastwood; his character gets redeemed. His ending is happy.

Yes, occasionally political messages get smuggled in by the filmmakers — pro-environmental in “The Pelican Brief” (1993); pro-civil liberties in “Enemy of the State” (1998) — but these messages don’t resonate. We remember other things: Julia Roberts’ startled shriek when the car blows up; Will Smith running through the streets of D.C. in a bathrobe. Politics is simply a backdrop for the star-fueled adventure we see in the foreground, and this backdrop is at once more cynical — we actually expect our leaders to kill us — and more innocent.

In “Three Days of the Condor,” John Houseman is asked if he misses the kind of action he saw after the Great War, and he responds, in that great Houseman voice, “I miss that kind of clarity.” The ’70s were all about a lack of clarity. America was in full adolescent mode back then — everybody sucked — but rather than fighting towards adulthood we’ve retreated to the false clarity of childhood. Whether the President of the United States is the rough-sex murderer of “Absolute Power” (1997) or the “Get off my plane” action hero of “Air Force One” (1997), or even the flight-suit-wearing President Bush of “Mission Accomplished” (2003), we know what to think of him. He’s a cartoon. And every morning is Saturday morning.

Karl Rove is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life
So is there any hope left for the political thriller? In a word: Yes. The freedom vs. security issues raised in “Enemy of the State” have a new complexity in a post-9/11 America (Jon Voight’s villain doesn’t sound so nutty anymore), while the industrial angle of Ike’s old “military-industrial complex” is still rife with possible villainy — as ENRON, and the updated “Manchurian Candidate,” point out. And don’t tell me something can’t be done with Karl Rove.

The material’s there; the question is whether a grown-up film can be made from it all. The politics to worry about, in other words, is Hollywood’s.

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