In the 1978 remake of The Body Snatchers, the great actor Donald Sutherland (who died yesterday at age 88) plays San Francisco health inspector Matthew Bennell, a bureaucrat with a sense of humor who never forgets that he’s only human, like the restaurateurs he visits.
Bennell has such faith in the system that when his colleague Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) begins to sense that those around her, including her husband, Jeffrey, are changing in disturbing ways, his first impulse is to encourage her to see his psychiatrist friend, Dr David Kibner. Jeffrey, Bennell jokes, might just be a Republican.
Bennell quickly buys into Elizabeth’s theory: strange, plant-like aliens take over human bodies and replicate, then assimilate their friends and loved ones, and they won’t stop until they have the entire planet for themselves.
The original 1958 film “The Body Snatchers” is famously open to conflicting interpretations: The all-consuming acts of the mob that attack our heroes could represent either Communism or the anti-Communist hysteria of McCarthyism.
The genius of Kaufman’s latest is that it transplants this creeping conformism to the “bohemian” milieu of California. When Elizabeth meets Kibner (at the publication party for his latest pop-psychology bestseller), he is comforting another woman whose husband she insists is not hers. Kibner comforts her with meaningless therapeutic chatter until she reluctantly gets over the instinctive feeling that something is terribly wrong.
Leonard Nimoy is perfectly cast as Kibner; he brings a bit of Spock’s inhuman rigor to the role, but the logic the character follows is 1970s self-help. Kibner is one of the first members of the group to turn and emerges as the primary antagonist; the difficulty of telling the real Kibner from a pod person duplicate is one of the film’s better jokes.
“There is no need for hate or love now,” he says at the end, urging our heroes to give in. “Don’t be held captive by your old concepts, Matthew, you are evolving into a new life form.”
For those of us who are alarmed by the many ways in which the craze for “progress” is distorting and corrupting life in America, that is a truly frightening statement.
