The Big Picture

• Meryl Streep's role in The Manchurian Candidate is a stark departure from her usual characters, showcasing her range and versatility.
• Senator Ellie Shaw is portrayed as diabolical, willing to sacrifice even her own son to achieve her twisted vision of power and control.
• The intense final scenes of the film see Streep's character meeting a dramatic end, as her plans are thwarted by Denzel Washington's character.

We all love us some Meryl Streep, don't we? Undeniably one of the finest actress that ever lived, she has dazzled us in dozens of films with her versatility and uncanny believability in all manner of genres. She really got our attention in the late '70s and '80s playing the soft and demure leading lady in films like The Deer Hunter, Sophie's Choice, and Out of Africa. We also love her as the take-no-prisoners girl boss that she has played in The Devil Wears Prada, Don't Look Up, and The Iron Lady. And sometimes, we just want to sit back and have fun with the master actor in romps like Mamma Mia! and Postcards From the Edge. But there is one particular role that exists in her filmography that is a most notable outlier from the three types that we're used to seeing Streep tackle listed above. In 2004, she took on the role of Senator Eleanor "Ellie" Shaw in the remake of the 1962 classic movie The Manchurian Candidate, and, boy, does she go against type in the most diabolical fashion, taking on the role originally played by Angela Lansbury, a legendary actress in her own right. If you thought Miranda Priestley was an awful person, her role in this remake makes Priestley look like a girl scout.

What Is 'The Manchurian Candidate' About?

Directed by Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), The Manchurian Candidate is a political thriller that involves the brainwashing of a platoon of Gulf War veterans who return home and start to experience strange and terrorizing nightmares about what really happened to them in the Middle East. Denzel Washington takes on the role played by the one and only Frank Sinatra and leads a terrific cast as Major Bennett Marcos. Washington's Marcos starts to put together the fragmented pieces of his and his fellow soldiers' memories in time to hopefully thwart a planned assassination and government coup by Congressman Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) and his mother, the ruthless and evil Senator Ellie Shaw. Only, Raymond has absolutely no idea that he is being used as a pawn by his own mother, Ellie, who is using implants surgically injected into the men's bodies to control the men. They become hypnotized when they hear their full names spoken aloud to them and carry out the senator's duplicitous and misguided orders like trained seals. We have to admit, however, the use of the Queen of Diamonds playing card in the original with Sinatra was much cooler.

What Makes Meryl Streep So Despicable in 'The Manchurian Candidate'?

We're going to tackle why Streep's character Ellie Shaw is so incredibly diabolical in The Manchurian Candidate using the "three strikes, and you're out" method borrowed from America's greatest pastime — baseball. The first strike is that she is a politician working in Congress. Do we need to say anything else? No, but we will. Strike two is that she attempts a government coup and has absolutely no regard for anyone or anything but herself. Her self-righteous modus operandi believing that her version of what America should look like is beyond despicable, and she'll go to any extent to make sure it becomes a reality, including violating the sacred pact between a mother and her son which brings us to the last swing and miss. Strike three is that she is more than willing to use her own son to carry out her myopic and warped strategy to get a stranglehold on absolute executive power.

For a mother to sacrifice her own flesh and blood in the pursuit of a particular ideology, no matter how strongly she believes it to be true or just, is a violation of the most wholesome and organic bond between a parent and their child. She's never been so loathsome as when she tells her mind-controlled son that "You're going to save our country now. In the hour of her greatest need." And three strikes mean you are outta here!

What Happens at the End of 'The Manchurian Candidate'?

Everything appears to be in place as Ellie uses her brainwashing technique in order to get her son Raymond to agree to kill the presidential candidate at a campaign convention. She has succeeded in getting Raymond on the ticket as the Vice Presidential nominee, so if the assassination of the likely winner of the election is successful, then her son will become the President of the United States. This ostensibly will make her the most powerful person on the planet since she has the ability to make Raymond do exactly as she commands through hypnosis. It's as brilliant a plot as it is diabolical. Only one man can stop it and this is where Denzel becomes the deus ex machina of sorts to save the day. In the most drastic departure from the original where Raymond assassinates his mother and her accomplice as a sniper, the remake has Washington, who has many iconic roles under his belt, as the sniper in the rafters who is tasked with making sure that the presidential candidate isn't assassinated by Raymond. In the 2004 remake, it's not Raymond Shaw but Major Bennett Marcos who finds himself as the last line of defense between a dictatorial coup and the free democratic republic that has made America unique for the last 250 years.

As mentioned above, the final scenes in the remake differ greatly from the Sinatra-Lansbury original. Most notable is that it isn't Shaw who pulls the trigger, but Major Marcos who is assigned with thwarting Ellie Shaw's scheme. Senator Ellie Shaw believes she has hypnotized Marcos into killing the likely winning presidential candidate, Robert Arthur (Tom Stechshulte). The FBI is watching closely as they know something is afoot after having successfully removed Marcos' surgically implanted mind-control device. Candidates Arthur and Shaw triumphantly make their way to the stage to address the excited crowd flanked on both sides by rows of American flags.

Meanwhile, Marcos has made his way to a sniper's bird's nest in the rafters having been given the order to kill Arthur. But Ellie Shaw is unaware that both her son Raymond and Major Marcos are free of the mind-control implants and are pretending to be under her spell. When Raymond reaches out for Ellie to dance on stage in front of a raucous and loud crowd, he is actually positioning both of them to be a clean shot for Marcos. The two men exchange a knowing look through the crosshairs of Marcos' rifle as if to say, "Take us both out." Marcos pauses but sees the earnestness in the eyes of the soldier he fought side by side with in Iraq, and they acknowledge each other before Marcos fires a coup de gras shot that pierces through both Raymond and Ellie who fall lifeless to the stage floor.

There is a great scene in the film where Streep enters a room full of powerful men and takes them all to task in the process of promoting her own selfish agenda. She absolutely owns the room and the scene, humbling the dignitaries with a sound and articulate argument. It's not at all surprising, as she has made a career out of demanding the camera's focus while leaving us all dumbfounded that we can still separate the transcendent star from the character she is portraying. Not once do you ever think to yourself, "Well that's just Meryl Streep pretending to be a passionate politician." She embodies a role, and you're helpless to deny her presence within it – hook, line, and sinker. We take the bait every time and love doing it.

The Manchurian Candidate is currently available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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