I resisted seeing this movie for years. It took a glowing review from a filmmaker I respect, and steady, friendly prodding by wife (along with a Ben and Jerry’s bribe), but I finally sat down and watched it.
Context is everything with this film, so let me give you some. V for Vendetta is based off a ten-issue comic book written by Alan Moore (who so hates Hollywood’s filthy fingers on his projects that he refuses to be paid or credited for any adaptations of his work) with art by David Lloyd. It was published in the late 80s. I got a collected edition--and four volumes of The Walking Dead, another comic book that’s transitioned well to the screen--for Christmas when I was thirteen. I got the books early, at a wedding: I had the flu, and spent most of the reception in the bathroom of the hotel room I shared with my younger brother. I suppose my grandmother figured I needed something to read on the floor.
I didn’t get around to reading V for Vendetta until one o’clock in the morning. I didn’t finish it until five, delirious with exhaustion, cold medication, and the vicious little virus swirling around in my guts.
That comic book changed my life.
This was two years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, during the absolute peak of the homeland-security paranoia that followed: people were disappearing, bustled off to secret prisons; Muslims, even those born in America, were undisguised targets of racial fear and hatred everywhere we cared to look, from the street to the evening news; phones were tapped, emails were read, electric eyes watched everybody, everywhere, all the time.
And here were Alan Moore and David Lloyd, telling me all about it, shouting to me from 1989. Reading that comic changed the way I thought about government, about the relationship between consent and control, about the media, about religion, about a citizen’s responsibility to his or her fellow citizenry...about everything. So when I started seeing trailers for what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, a slick Hollywood action movie with the same name as the political masterwork I cherished--by the makers of The Matrix, no less--I vowed never to watch it and went on with my life.
It’s actually not directed by the Wachowski siblings, and outside of some silly and unneeded use of “Bullet Time,” their influence keeps mostly to the screenplay, which they co-wrote. The film is actually directed by James McTeigue. It’s his first directing credit, and easily the best of his films.
V for Vendetta shows us the breaking point of a totalitarian England from the point of view of Evey (Natalie Portman), a timid cog in the machine. This breaking point (as well as Evey’s character arc) is instigated by V, an antihero-cum-anarchist who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and plans to fulfill his kindred predecessor’s plan of blowing up the Houses of Parliament. V is played by Wachowski favorite Hugo Weaving, who is masterful in the mask. I particularly applaud McTeigue’s resisting the mortal sin of Movies with Men in Masks: showing us the actor's face and ruining the effect our imaginations worked so hard to build. In V, the mask stays on. We never see Weaving’s face. Where many other movies fail, V succeeds, and the titular hero is transformed into something more than “the actor who played Elrond and Mr. Smith.” V becomes a symbol.
In fact, the entire cast is superlative, from Portman’s nuanced transformation as Evey (foreshadowing her Oscar-winning performance in 2010’s Black Swan: many of the same notes are played here, and almost as well) to Stephen Rea’s dogged Detective Finch. (Rea mastered Resigned Determination in a Hopeless Situation playing Fergus in 1992’s The Crying Game. It shines in, here.) Stephen Fry manages a beautiful balance of humor and pathos as the oppressed but defiant Deitrich. The only note that clunks is, surprisingly, John Hurt as the giant shouting head-on-a-screen leader of the fascist (read: Nazi stand-in) government: he plays Angry and Evil and not much else, and feels flat in a gallery of gradient, shadow, and depth.
Speaking of gradient, shadow, and depth, the cinematography in this film is exceptional. I don’t know whether to credit McTeigue, Adrian Biddle (director of photography), or the Wachowskis in the wings, but there are layers of influence and homage here that resonate with each other without muddying up the broader picture, and the final effect is, for true movie lovers, intensely gratifying. Yes, there are Matrix moments (the aforementioned “Bullet Time” knives, a few one-versus-many martial arts fights, and V's meeting with Evey feels a little "red pill, blue pill"), but the film is far more in debt to the Big Brother, Dystopian Future films of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Many of the shots look like updated nods to paranoia-cinema like A Clockwork Orange (1971), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1985, which starred, perhaps not coincidentally, John Hurt), and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). It’s nothing so gauche as winks and nods; rather, Biddle and company manage to capture the feel of those films through shot composition, lighting, lens selection (a fair portion of the film is shot wide, showcasing the gorgeous texture and detail in the sets), and quietly shifting color palettes.
In the end, what I liked most about V for Vendetta was what thirteen-year-old me most hated about the idea of a film version: the movie strays away from the source material. Perhaps in twenty years this movie will have lost its relevance, but I doubt it. Released just four years after 9/11, the fingerprints of Capital-T-Terror are all over this: homosexuals are swapped in for Muslims, persecuted under a wave of nationalism, media-inspired fear, and fear-inspired religion, whisked away in the night to hellish secret prisons and usually subsequently executed or experimented on. Seeing Deitrich’s hidden room of fine art and homoerotica juxtaposed with V’s Gallery of Shadows--consisting of sculptures, music, and fine art stolen from government storehouses--is a bit unsettling when you consider the context. These garrets of Things That Offend ring like technologically-advanced versions of Anne Frank's attic: beauty hiding in the shadows from the monsters outside. The film goes a long way to illustrate the myriad similarities between the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act Nationalism and Hitler’s Third Reich.
Watching V for the first time in 2016, in the midst of Trump’s Hate-Fear-and-Bigotry campaign for the White House, let me tell you: the parallels are even more frightening. It seems we’re always reading or watching cautionary tales of dystopian futures...yet as a society, we keep running straight toward them.
If we can’t learn from the past or listen to the alarms sounding in the present, what chance do we have for a future?
Perhaps Detective Finch poses the crucial question at the heart of the film: If your government is the parent who protects you from the monsters under the bed...but is also the monsters under the bed...would you want to know?
Food for thought.