V for Vendetta (Particle Man)

I must say, this movie holds the record for number of hours (days) I’ve spent thinking about or discussing a movie. I saw it almost two weeks ago, and have not gotten it out of my head the entire time. People who know me at least reasonably well know that I am a pretty hard person to offend. I usually take things in my stride, and it takes a lot of bigotry, sightlessness, conceit or ignorance to get me going. With all that being said, V for Vendetta did it. It touched a nerve, or crossed a line, or pushed a button, or something, and it offended me.

I’m glad I put in for the last slot in the week to review it, because that gave me time to process it to greatest effect. In retrospect, I realize that it was supposed to be somewhat offensive. Comic book movies, and indeed comic books themselves, try to do a lot at one time. They try to vastly entertain you while giving you a very clear social and philosophical message. One only has to look to the many examples in the past to see this: Sin City, X-Men, The Punisher, Superman, The Matrix, Hulk, the list goes on. V for Vendetta didn’t have as many comic book conventions as other movies, and it played more elements completely straight and realistic.

The original author of the graphic novel, Alan Moore, has distanced himself from this project, as he did with his past comic book/movie adaptations. He says the movie turned it into something it was never intended to be, that the Wachowski brothers took it and ran with it, apparently quite a distance from where it was supposed to go. I think if they wanted to make a political satire of Bush, they shouldn’t have tried to couch it in a completely unrelated storyline.

I had incredibly numerous problems with V for Vendetta, not the least of which was with the character of V himself. What is he? I originally saw him as a monster and a psychopath with an expansive vocabulary, and still do. I believe in V’s ideas in a very hazy, conceptual sense, but I definitely do not agree with his methods. Blowing up buildings and killing people doesn’t seem like the way to affect positive change. I’ll admit that the English major in me got off when he delivered his initial speech, the one with all the v words. There is no connection between what he says he believes and what he does, however. And when there is a connection, it’s not an honorable one. He murders the TV host and blows up Parliament, but I didn’t understand how acts of violence got his point across. Later, when he murdered all the scientists, I understood it completely, and it was not what he attested to. He did it in revenge for what they did to him, not in righteous fury for what they did to the world at large.

V is an anti-hero. Like Cool Hand Luke, Wolverine, Boo Radley, and Jack Bauer, he’s a very nasty guy who fights for good. Like with any anti-hero, it up to the story to convince us that what the anti-hero does is necessary for the greater good. “The greater good” is a Marxist idea, however, and it doesn’t work on a large scale. Marxism is good for micromanagement, and that’s it. V’s ideas, though very good, cannot be put into practice in the grand scale, like he tries to do, without costing things that shouldn’t be spent.

Hazy concepts aside, I thought the movie itself was okay, but I was expecting so much more. The comic book trappings are replaced by realism, and more often than not, that fails. Hugo Weaving does an incredible job as V, with the limit of being trapped behind a mask for the entire movie, eliminating an actor’s most useful tool. Natalie Portman is supposed to make up for it, being the yin to his yang, but falls far short. I was surprised by her woodenness and single dimensionality, because she was so brilliant in Garden State. I guess it’s hit or miss with her. While she is remarkably appealing, her emotional repertoire seemed very limited in this movie. Her main problem is that it is never explained why she’s essential to the plot. The role Evey played could have been filled by anyone, not just Evey. A main character should be instantly accessible and completely indispensable, and she wasn’t. Stephen Rea was superb as Finch, the cop who just wanted to do the right thing. He played him as a truly good man of the law, one who wants to do what society expects of him, but eventually finds that the tenets of the society he lives in are not consistent with what he knows to be right in his heart. His performance was filled with subtlety and British dryness, which hit all the right notes.

This movie has stirred things up in my group of friends like few things can. While that doesn’t make it a good movie, it makes it an important and worthwhile one. I can’t say I liked it, because I definitely did not. However, I can’t say it wasn’t a good experience, or that you shouldn’t see it. The entertaining aspects of the movie were not quite enough to balance out the messages, and in the end it came out on the negative side. Some movies, like Elephant, Requiem for a Dream, A Civil Action, and 8MM, are in a class by themselves. They are incredibly deep movies that carry huge social issues and ask very important questions, but they’re not very entertaining. Obviously, V for Vendetta can be argued to be very entertaining, but for me it wasn’t. I don’t think I was able to see past the social issues to see the movie itself. In light of that, I need to see it again.

Iconic lines:
“A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.”

22 Rating: -5