Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

I came home a short time ago from seeing V for Vendetta, a film based on a 1980s story written and illustrated by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Set in a bleak, relatively near-future where a totalitarian Great Britain has come about due to a governmentally-created and sustained climate of fear. The government's darkest secrets from the dark days when it took power and purged the nation of "undesirables" have been personified and come back to take it down, and he's wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

I expect that critics will largely pan or dismiss the film, be it out of their own sense of self-importance, the connection to the Wachowski brothers pushing their Matrix buttons, their politics being too Conservative to give the film's message any positive nod or their thin blood leaving them too weak to risk being accused of supporting or allowing any justification for terrorism. The "with us or against us", Right vs Wrong, "our enemies are madmen" attitudes have been with us relentlessly for a few years now and I expect to see that evidenced in many mainstream reviews. Ironically, by doing so such critics only lend credence to some of the film's themes.

The most positive professional reviews, I expect, will dismiss the content as somehow simplistically juvenile and emphasize it as stylish entertainment, bucking a negative line with a thumbs up while leaving themselves off the hook concerning moral issues by simply waving them off as irrelevantly presented by this film. Other than that, I expect shades of "I knew George Orwell, and you, sir, are no George Orwell!" to pervade several of the reviews.

While the film does have its shortcomings - ranging from the lead political figures being as irredeemably corrupt or seemingly two-dimensionally evil, to their forces being incompetent to a degree that's mind-boggling ludicrous as the film draws towards its climax - it was truer to the source material than I'd expected it to be. Consequently, this is set in a Britain that's gone down its own dark path (early rumors had it rewritten into an anlternate timeline where the Nazis had won WWII; I was very pleased to see that wasn't the case), and the stylish V himself is verbose and ostentatious, though he tones that down as the movie proceeds. I'd expected (based on a couple of early reviews I foolishly glanced over) that the government in power and its methods would be more simplistically arch than they were, when in fact the speeches and government-controlled propaganda machine operated more smoothly and artfully than anticipated. I had some momentary concerns that certain security measures were considerably more lax than they should be, but then I realized this was a bully government that, at its core, knew that (prior to V) they had no real enemies to face, only an already weeded and cowed populace to keep constantly afraid and unwilling to ask questions.

Hugo Weaving plays the lead with panache, though if you're a fan who needs to see his face, then you'll be disappointed. He only appears with his face covered by the mask or in shadow. I want to commend him and/or whoever was responsible for keeping his agent and the studio in check, as in any Hollywood production would find several entities insisting on either a flashback or dream sequence that would allow Hugo to get some face time.

Natalie Portman, as Evey, gets plenty of face time, and spending the latter half of the movie with her head shaved gets to sport a different look. She's effective in the role of a woman unwittingly caught up in the intrigue, though some audience members may have problems with various coincidences that ultimately make her uniquely suited to her place in the story. The screenwriters were likely all too aware of this, which is likely why we're told more than once that there are no coincidences, only the illusion of them. (I'm sure lazy critics looking for Matrix-y elements to enable a reflex dismissal will latch onto bits like that.)

Stephen Fry (seen here on the left) plays the role of Gordon Dietrich, a talk show host who turns out to be a more entertaining and endearing character than he at first seems.

Stephen Rea plays Finch, a very high-ranking member of the police force who is the only moral man sitting in on what are essentially cabinet meetings. An earnest investigator who follows the leads despite their leading back to the government he's serving, he makes the most of the part and helps keep it from being simply a plot device for revealing the country's dark past on behalf of the audience. Here he's seen, late in the film, with Natalie Portman.

John Hurt plays Chancellor Adam Sutler, the big cheese who appears in most scenes as an obviously Big Brotherish presence on television screens and a small theater-sized screen at shadow cabinet meetings. The presentation is an obvious nod to both Orwell's 1984 and to the irony of having Hurt having played the part of Winston Smith in the film, a man who suffered at the cold hands of just such a system. Fifteen years ago I might have waved off many aspects of the red-faced, nearly foaming, stentorian delivery as unrealistically over the top, but having seen the rise of right wing talk radio and television it's all too entirely believable. An uncompromising extremist, like all of the most dangerous men in human history he's a man of faith who is unswervingly devoted to his vision of the world and doesn't pause for a blink to wonder if the end justifies the means.

I don't mean by any of this to imply that the title character is presented as some paragon of morality. It's not worth the attempt to deny that he's largely driven by revenge, and in the pursuit of that and the higher goal of nudging the people to retake their freedom some people are killed either directly or by being used as decoys who are simply doing their jobs. The best one can say is that as the film winds to its close it's arguable that the weight of his actions are weighing on him, too.

An entertaining, visually stylish film, it's worth seeing and should lead to some discussions unless the people you see it with are either already politically polarized into immobility or have been numbed by these modern times into not questioning anything. Not a must-see, but one I was looking forward to for a year (it was originally supposed to premiere this past November, within 24 hours of the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes' attempt to blow up Parliament.

Despite all of the above, the film is in the end upbeat and hopeful.

The film earned its R rating via violence, possibly minor nudity, and while there's no sex, depending upon how one counts such things there's more than one attempted rape and some related, threatening language, so keep that in mind when gauging suitability.

So... have you seen it? Agree? Disagree? I've left many elements out - this was going on long enough - and maybe there are aspects you feel deserve more attention, from other performances to all of the future history digs at the U.S.? Sometimes I'm too close to these things -- it's just occurred to me that I didn't think to mention that the guy's a superhuman combatant and killing machine.