Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/12/08
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason the Gunpowder
Treason should ever be forgot.”
-The Bonfire Prayer, traditional English
rhyme sung on November 5, Guy Fawkes Night
I've
heard a fair amount of backlash against The Dark
Knight saying that, while it stirs up a hornet's nest of hot button
issues, it doesn't really “say” anything about the times in which we live.
Perhaps that's because what it does say is more about how iconic comic
book characters would deal with those problems than how we as citizens
of the real world have. The fact is that action blockbusters very
rarely have “something to say”. They may add spice to their narratives
by referencing the topical, but if a big-budget FX spectacular takes a
stand on anything, you can expect that it's going to be “Pollution is bad”,
“Corruption is wrong” or “Water is wet”. So how strange was it in
2006 to see producers Joel Silver and The Wachowski Brothers (who also
wrote the script) embark on a big-budget action spectacular based on Alan
Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta, an anarchist tract they tweaked
into a commentary on the politics of power and fear, post 9/11? Although
Hollywood had been mostly mum on the Bush Administration and the War on
Terror, public opinion was steadily turning against both by this time,
so that doesn't make V a particularly incendiary title. What
does is its' central contention: that terrorism, the single dirtiest
word in American life in the years following Al Qaeda's attacks on the
US, is morally neutral. What makes it good or evil is the kind of
establishment it's being used against. In other words, against a
government like its' freedom-smashing fictional English regime of Adam
Sutler, V for Vendetta tells us, terrorism is not only morally acceptable,
but our civic duty. Agree or disagree with its' thesis, V is
a stunner, brilliantly acted, wildly cinematic, and did I mention
it's got a thesis?
The
film starts with a brief flashback to 1605, when Guy Fawkes attempted to
blow up Parliament and was hung for his trouble. Then we're off to
the Not Too Distant Future, when “America's War” ended up bringing down
the Superpower along with most of the world, while a totalitarian England
remains strong under the police state of High Chancellor Adam Sutler (John
Hurt). Evey (Natalie Portman) works for the government TV station
that keeps the populace distracted with nonsense and misinformed with propaganda,
particularly from the nightly broadcasts of the self-proclaimed Voice of
England, Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam). One night, she finds herself
out after curfew and is attacked by two of the Secret Police called Fingermen.
They're interrupted by a strange figure (Hugo Weaving) in a hat,
cape and Guy Fawkes harlequin mask. He calls himself V and speaks
in ornate, stagy terms that inspire Evey to ask “Are you a crazy person?”
A trained fighter, he routs the Fingermen and invites Evey to join him
on a nearby roof to watch “a concert”: he's patched into the government's
emergency broadcasting system and uses it to awaken the sleeping London
citizens with classical music as he blows up London's Central Count building,
the Old Bailey. Their paths cross again when V stages a daring attack
on the network newscast, commandeering the airwaves to broadcast a message
calling upon all the citizens of London to join him one year from that
day to finish what Fawkes started. Evey saves V from the police,
and he returns the favor by carrying her unconscious body back to his lair,
where he tells her she must remain until his plans have been carried out.
Meanwhile, The State calls on Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea) to find and
silence V, but as the bodies of powerful State officials start to pile
up, the trail of evidence leads back toward the origin of the government
itself: a series of terror attacks that convinced the public they
needed to be safe more than they needed to be free. But who was really
behind those attacks, and can a new act of terror restore what they took
away?
All
that's only the beginning of V for Vendetta's dense, incendiary
narrative. A bravura sequence intercuts between Finch reflecting
on a feeling that everyone and everything's connected, that he can feel
how everything that happened before was leading up to the events of the
next November 5, while V sets up an elaborate series of dominoes and knocks
them over with a flourish. History's like that, with today's atrocity
becoming tomorrow's grudge and next year's crusade. Today's victim
is tomorrow's martyr. Perhaps that's why totalitarian regimes tend
to fall after a few decades: their day to day business is like a
grudge machine. And even those V characters who don't know
it when the film begins have plenty to hold against Sutler's regime.
The
narrative centers around three primary characters, brought to life by three
sensational performances. Let's start with V. He's a challenging
and unique creation in so many ways, starting with the fact that we not
only never see his face, we never even see his eyes. The only skin
we ever glimpse is a moment of his ungloved hands, horribly burned.
That Weaving (who replaced James Purefoy early in the shoot) is able to
bring him to full, vibrant life with nothing but his voice and body language
is a real testament to the former Agent Smith's talents. Fittingly,
WHO V is turns out to be the least interesting part of him. Yes,
we do get a quasi-explanation for how he came to be, but what matters is
what this mystery man represents. V's embrace of freedom and revolution
are in many ways just a way for him to gain revenge against the government
that created him. No surprise, of course; terrorism may have a political
goal, but by its' very nature, it's personal. And the movie adopts
a certain “love the terror, not the terrorist” position. Even V himself
realizes that he's a movement, not a man, and that there's no place for
him in the world he's creating.
Evey,
on the other hand, starts out as a perfect citizen of Sutler England, reacting
to what the government has done to her and her family like an abused child
desperate to avoid being struck again. She supports V's cause, but
can't stomach his homicidal methods, at least until the movie's most ethically
challenging sequence. Abducted, tortured and manipulated by the Freedom
Fighter, Evey “sees the light” and becomes someone ready to do what must
be done. Of course, a less charitable reading of what happens is
that she's effectively brainwashed: all the tactics are the same,
but because we agree with the epiphany V's forcing on her, we don't see
it that way. Portman, sporting both a flawless English accent and
a wonderfully intangible British reserve, is excellent at every stop on
this journey.
Then
there's the least showy, but still indispensable role. Inspector
Finch has lost no loved one, and his career has flourished under the Sutler
regime. But he IS an Englishman, and the more he learns about what
has happened to his country, the less he can support his employers.
Rea's beaten-down sorrow in the role is pitch-perfect: immersed in
the day-to-day of keeping the totalitarian trains running, he's in mourning
before he even knows why. It's a wise decision by both V and the
writers who created him that both Evey (who represents the people) and
Finch must consent to the climactic fireworks. Unsupported by both
the populace he seeks to liberate and the better angels among the people
doing the oppressing, a terrorist is nothing but a murderous thug.
Uniformly
fine performances bring a gallery of other important characters to life.
John Hurt (who, ironically, played Winston Smith in the 1984 film version
of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) does something really interesting
as Sutler: he is utterly mortal and relentlessly desperate.
He communicates with his underlings only via giant TV monitor from a distant
bunker, but the brutal, furious close-ups we see have the effect of making
him smaller than life rather than larger. Here is a man who believes
he can shout down any problem, and when he finally comes face-to-face with
his foes, he is nothing but the sniveling coward anyone who was paying
attention knew he was all along. Tim Pigot-Smith is quite the opposite
as his enforcer, Creedy, who has no delusions: he loves power and
he loves sadism, and his position allows him to indulge both hobbies.
A true monster like Creedy would inevitably view a fake one like Sutler
with contempt, and V skillfully uses that contrast to his advantage.
The
movie also gives us two totally different TV personalities to consider.
Allam shines as the bombastic, egotistical Prothero, who bellows on every
night about how “England prevails!” but reminds his agent on the phone
the real reason why: “Because I say it does!” Prothero was
part of the conspiracy that put Sutler into power and made him insanely
wealthy, so it's interesting that he needs more: fame and the quasi-Godhood
that comes with being “The Voice of England”. On the other hand,
Evey's boss Deitrich (Stephen Fry) is a quiet comedian who believes his
fame immunizes him to make his anti-Sutler views more and more public.
Fry is a uniquely English personality and his calm, wry reserve serves
him well here: even we don't believe anything bad can happen to Deitrich,
after all, he's a STAR. But all power that doesn't flow from The
State is an illusion in Sutler's England, something he learns very well
after staging a Benny Hill-style comedy sketch that mocks the Chancellor.
When I first saw the movie two years ago, I didn't like the sketch at all
because it's not even remotely funny. But seeing the movie again
knowing what would happen, it's so utterly reckless that it's scary to
watch.
The
most important small role belongs to Natasha Wightman. She plays
Valerie, who occupied the cell next to V while he was held by the government.
As she slowly died at the hands of their experiments, she wrote the story
of her life on toilet paper and hid it in her cell, a document V arranges
to have Evey find in her cell to experience the raw terror Sutler unleashed
on anyone who was “different” upon taking power. Valerie was a lesbian,
and Wightman's calm, loving voice explains to us first how she came to
be comfortable with who she was, then to find true love with Ruth (Mary
Stockley). They live together for a short, happy time until the shadows
of Sutlerism begin to descend, leaving them to sit in front of their TV
in quiet terror watching their status become a national crisis, the meaning
of words change, and finally both end up in the clutches of the Fingermen
to die in their mad experiments. This is the movie's strongest sequence,
bringing the nightmare of a modern Holocaust to intimate life in just a
few moments, and much of the credit goes to Wightman's amazing performance.
V
for Vendetta was the directorial debut of James McTiegue, the underrated
Wachowski collaborator who served as First AD on the Matrix trilogy
and Speed Racer and joined them in directing
reshoots on The Invasion (he's also directing
the forthcoming Wachowski-produced kung fu homage Ninja Assassin).
His work here is nothing short of extraordinary, getting uniformly strong
performances, staging first-rate action without allowing it to overwhelm
the movie's more thoughtful goals, and composes a movie full of wonderful
shots (“V”s are everywhere if you're looking for them). The Wachowskis
script sticks to the basics of Moore's anarchist narrative (confession,
I know this because I've read a summary of it, not the graphic novel itself)
while smoothing some of the rough edges. Of course, the biggest change,
and the one that drove Moore himself bananas, is substituting freedom for
anarchy. Being a pretty big believer in freedom and not much of a
fan of anarchy, I can't help but approve of the change, but the movie doesn't
pretend to know the answer to the question “What now?” once its' climactic
events have essentially demolished the Sutler government. Anarchy
is not beyond the question as the credits begin to roll, but I'd like to
think that the people had learned a better lesson than that.
So,
about that climax. *****SPOILER ALERT: ALL BETS ARE OFF*****
Guy Fawkes has been glamorized as a freedom fighter, but he was willing
to rain death and destruction on more than the elite of London in a spectacularly
misguided effort to end the persecution of English Catholics by murdering
the King and cutting off the line of succession. V's plot is far
cleaner and leaner, the smooth, modern demolition of an empty Parliament
as a symbol that the old government is over and the country starts with
a clean slate. You've got to be a pretty big fan of that building
not to be roused by that sequence, which includes pretty much all of London
descending on the building in Fawkes masks. Some regard that part
of the ending as corny, but I've often thought that the only way for Americans
to stand up to the rampant corruption that's overrun our government is
to do the same thing. No, not blow up Congress, but to drop everything
and SHOW UP, en mass, regardless of party or ethnic group, and clog the
streets as far around the Capital as we'll fit to show the Powers that
Be that we're watching. And it's in this way that the citizens of
V's England give their unanimous approval to the destruction Evey and Finch
allow to happen. I LOVE the film's final flourish, when the people
take off their masks to reveal not only the living citizens who marched
on the building, but also the dead whose sacrifices made the moment possible.
It's more than just a tearjerker moment, because those people are the dominoes
we watched fall earlier, and now the circle is complete. It's a perfect
way to underscore why the 5th of November will be remembered by all who
follow. *****END OF SPOILERS*****
Not
surprising given the people involved, V is a top-shelf technical
package across the board. I was really impressed by the quality of
the sound editing (I thought I heard each of those dominoes fall individually),
and Adrian Biddle's red-and-black centered cinematography creates a world
that is at once realistic and fanciful. The score by Dario Marianelli
(who'd later win an Oscar for his amazing work on Atonement)
sets a perfect mood for a movie that's both a comic book adventure and
a political tract.
I've
now seen V for Vendetta in a theater three times, twice upon its'
2006 release and a few weeks ago as part of a college film series.
We're well down the road from a time when Conservative voices had so successfully
shouted down all opposition in the name of National Security, in part because
they simply couldn't govern well enough to deliver economic security to
go with it. But at a time when we're all taking stock of the mistakes
a new President should not repeat, V is a good movie to revisit.
Nobody wants to see masked freedom fighters blowing up our national monuments,
so let's make sure that doesn't become the lesser of two evils. |
