'Dystopia' with a capital V

Roger Ebert March 16, 2006

It is the year 2020. A virus runs wild in the world, most Americans are dead, and Britain
is ruled by a fascist dictator who promises security but not freedom. One man stands
against him, the man named V, who moves through London like a wraith despite the
desperate efforts of the police. He wears a mask showing the face of Guy Fawkes, who in
1605 tried to blow up the houses of Parliament. On Nov. 5, the eve of Guy Fawkes Day,
British schoolchildren for centuries have started bonfires to burn Fawkes in effigy. On
this eve in 2020, V saves a young TV reporter named Evey from rape at the hands of the
police, forces her to join him, and makes a busy night of it by blowing up the Old Bailey
courtrooms.

"V for Vendetta" will follow his exploits for the next 12 months, until the night when he
has vowed to strike a crushing blow against the dictatorship. We see a police state that
hold citizens in an iron grip and yet is humiliated by a single man who seems
impervious. The state tries to suppress knowledge of his deeds -- to spin a plausible
explanation for the destruction of the Old Bailey, for example. But V commandeers the
national television network to claim authorship of his deed.
This story was first told as a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and published in 1982
and 1983. Its hero plays altogether differently now, and yet, given the nature of the
regime. is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter? Britain is ruled by a man named Sutler,
who gives orders to his underlings from a wall-sized TV screen and seems the
personification of Big Brother. And is: Sutler is played by John Hurt, who in fact played
Winston Smith in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1984). (V seems more like Jack the Ripper,
given his ability to move boldly in and out of areas the police think they control. The
similarity may have come easily to Moore, whose graphic novel “From Hell” was about
the Ripper, and inspired a good 2001 movie by the Hughes brothers.

"V for Vendetta" has been written and co-produced by the Wachowskis, Andy and Lana,
whose "Matrix" movies also were about rebels holding out against a planetary system of
control. This movie is more literary and less dominated by special effects (although
there are plenty), and is filled with ideas that are all the more intriguing because we
can't pin down the message. Is this movie a parable about 2006, a cautionary tale or a
pure fantasy? It can be read many ways, as I will no doubt learn in endless e-mails.

The character of V and his relationship with Evey (Natalie Portman) inescapably
reminds us of the Phantom of the Opera. V and the Phantom are both masked, move
through subterranean spaces, control others through the leverage of their imaginations
and have a score to settle. One difference, and it is an important one, is that V's facial
disguise does not move (unlike, say, the faces of a Batman villain) but is a mask that
always has the same smiling expression. Behind it is the actor Hugo Weaving, using his
voice and body language to create a character, but I was reminded of my problem with
Thomas the Tank Engine: If something talks, its lips should move.

Still, Portman’s Evey has expressions enough for most purposes, as she morphs from a
dutiful citizen to V’s sympathizer, and the film is populated with a gallery of gifted
character actors. In addition to Hurt as the sinister dictator, we see Stephen
Rea and Rupert Graves as the police assigned to lead the search for V. Tim Pigott-
Smith is an instrument of the dictator. These people exist in scenes designed to portray
them as secure, until V sweeps in like a whirlwind, using martial arts, ingenious
weapons and the element of surprise. Why the mask does not limit his peripheral vision
is a question I will leave for the experts.
There are ideas in this film. The most pointed is V’s belief: “People should not be afraid
of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” I am not sure V
has it right; surely in the ideal state governments and their people should exist happily
together. Fear in either direction must lead to violence. But V has a totalitarian state to
overthrow, and only a year to do it in, and we watch as he improvises a revolution. He
gets little support, although Stephen Fry plays a dissident TV host who criticizes the
government at his peril.
With most action thrillers based on graphic novels, we simply watch the sound and light
show. "V for Vendetta," directed by James McTeigue, almost always has something
going on that is actually interesting, inviting us to decode the character and plot and
apply the message where we will. There are times when you think the soundtrack should
be supplying "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols. The movie ends with a violent act
that left me, as a lover of London, intensely unhappy; surely V's enemy is human, not
architectural.

The film has been disowned by Alan Moore, who also removed his name from the movie
versions of his graphic novels From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
but then any sane person would have been unhappy with the Gentlemen. His complaint
was not so much with the films as with the deal involving the use of his work. I have not
read the original work, do not know what has been changed or gone missing, but found
an audacious confusion of ideas in "V for Vendetta" and enjoyed their manic
disorganization. To attempt a parable about terrorism and totalitarianism that would be
relevant and readable might be impossible, could be dangerous and would probably not
be box office.

The Movie Review: 'V for Vendetta'

"Remember, remember the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot," a
voiceover intones at the opening of V for Vendetta. "I know of no reason why the
Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot." The popular British rhyme--which the film
generously repeats again less than ten minutes later for those stuck in the concession
line the first time around--refers, of course, to Guy Fawkes's unsuccessful plot to blow
up the British Parliament in 1605. Though Fawkes and his radical Catholic co-
conspirators managed to smuggle eighteen hundred pounds of gunpowder into a cellar
beneath Parliament, they were caught before bringing their plan to fruition, and were
subsequently tried and executed. Guy Fawkes Day and its attendant conventions--the
grinning Fawkes masks, the burning in effigy of a Fawkes dummy--are celebrations not
of the plot, but of its failure. (Indeed, subsequent verses of the "Fifth of November"
include some choice words for the Pope.)

When writer Alan Moore chose Guy Fawkes as a model for "V," the masked antihero of
his dystopian 1980s comic book "V for Vendetta," he obviously understood this context.
Though V is trying to topple a fascist regime (based on Moore's decidedly paranoid view
of Thatcherism), he is himself an ambiguous figure, an anarchistic force of pure
destruction who is quite possibly insane. The first sign of trouble with the $50 million film
adaptation of Moore's story (written by the Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame, and
directed by their protege James McTiegue) is the brief but peculiar introduction of
Fawkes, a religious extremist and terrorist, as a heroic martyr. It is an early taste of how
V will be presented--also a terrorist, also a hero--and of the moral and political idiocies
to come.

Moore's comic envisioned a fascist British government that had come to power in the
wake of a nuclear war. The film, released on video today, updates this scenario for
contemporary (and American) audiences in two ways: First, the event that precipitated
the descent into dictatorship was a biological attack on English soil; and second, though
allegedly the work of terrorists, the attack was in fact conducted by the British
government itself, as a pretext for exerting vast, police-state powers over the lives of its
citizens. The resonance with critiques of the Bush administration's political use of the
war on terror are hard to miss and entirely intentional.

Whether or not one believes that governments manufacture crises and invent enemies
in this way, there's one group clearly guilty of the accusation: Hollywood filmmakers.
What do movies do, after all, if not spin fictions intended to manipulate our emotions? A
villain is conceived and given loathsome qualities in order that we will thrill when the
hero dispatches him. Creating such imaginary foes is an innocent enough device when
it comes to entertainment--a necessary one, even--but it is to some degree a fascist
one, and as such an awkward fit for a film, like V for Vendetta, that wants to lecture us
about the horrors of fascism. We're meant to hate the movie's imaginary dictatorship for
its violent means; so much so that, by the end, we will find V's flamboyant
violence against the dictatorship good and just and emotionally satisfying.

The whole movie builds toward this bloody catharsis. It opens with young Evey
Hammond (Natalie Portman) setting out into the London streets at night, on her way to
an appointment. She is accosted, however, by plainclothes policemen who inform her
that it is past curfew and declare their intention, by way of punishment, to rape her.
They are interrupted by the appearance of "V" (Hugo Weaving), a clown-masked, knife-
wielding champion with a tiresome fondness for iambic pentameter and words
beginning with his own initial. ("Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose,"
he notes with commendable self-awareness.) After dispatching Evey's tormentors, V
invites her to a nearby rooftop to witness the culmination of a pet project of his--
specifically, the explosive demolition of the Old Bailey courthouse. And what a display it
is: Though he may be a terrorist, V is a showman too: He leads up to his big bang by
blaring the 1812 Overture from speakers all around the city, and he follows it with a
professional-grade fireworks show.
If this opening sounds astonishingly silly, that's because it is. But, while there are plenty
of embarrassing moments still to come--when, for instance, V brings Evey to his art-
strewn secret lair and declares, "It's my home. I call it the Shadow Gallery"--the film
gradually acquires considerable narrative texture and weight. V conducts a series of
vendettas against individual enemies that are staged with style and sophistication. Evey
leaves and reunites with V more than once, at one point hiding out with her kindly boss
(Stephen Fry), who proves to be a secret subversive--a gay art collector who uses his
TV variety show to poke fun at the government. (At least, that is, until said government
breaks into his house and beats him to death.) And a sympathetic policeman named
Finch (Stephen Rhea), himself something of an outsider thanks to his Irish heritage,
tries to piece together V's history, which seems connected to a secret government
prison camp long since abandoned.

Fry and Rhea both bring a dose of nuance and humanity to the proceedings, and thank
goodness. The villains of the film are for the most part one-dimensional monsters: a
pedophile priest, a bullyboy talk-show host, a dead-eyed chief of the secret police, and
John Hurt as the "Chancellor," a ranting, goateed tyrant whose towering countenance
berates his underlings from what appears to be an Imax screen. (It's an enjoyable if
obvious reversal of his casting as Winston Smith in 1984.) V, too, is an inevitably
distant, inhuman figure, expressionless and indistinct in his jester's mask. At times
Weaving's dialogue, which was re-dubbed after filming, seems utterly disconnected
from V's grinning visage, as if it were the voice of a disembodied narrator. (Indeed, it's
not even consistently Weaving behind the mask; in addition to stunt doubles, there are
still some scenes that feature James Purefoy, who was initially cast as V, but left after a
few weeks of filming.) As Evey, Portman is the film's intended star, but she carries it
only intermittently. I've written before about the actress's disconcerting girlishness, and
while it is less problematic here than in other recent performances (with the exception of
an all-too-convincing scene in which she dresses up as teenage pedophile-bait), she
still fails to command the camera's attention. As a result, the scenes between Evey and
V are frequently the least compelling in the film.

The supporting performances by Fry and Rhea (and also Sinead Cusack, as a
repentant villainess) are equally crucial as a counterpoint to the otherwise pitiless
politics of the film: They suggest the possibility of reconciliation, of a middle ground
between the government jackboot and V's violent resistance. There is a period in the
latter half of the movie, when the filmmakers show signs of recognizing V to be a mirror
image of the very dictators he seeks to depose: He uses torture toward dubious ends;
he foments disorder, culminating in a little girl's death, in order to rouse the public to his
cause. For a while, it seems even Evey, the movie's conscience, may abandon V's
retributive plan.

Alas, she doesn't. In the end, the moral ambiguities are cast aside, as if the inadvertent
missteps of a film that has exceeded its creators' grasp. V is once again the hero--a role
the movie still inanely imagines he shares with Fawkes--and we are meant to cheer not
one but two violent climaxes. The first is a bloody blade ballet in which V dispatches a
troop of paramilitary thugs, a scene that fetishizes knives as thoroughly as The
Matrix did bullets. V's shimmering blades pinwheel through the air and arterial spray
blossoms like crimson fireworks, all in rapturous slo mo. Earlier in the film, V had
lectured, "While the truncheon can be used in lieu of conversation, words will always
retain their power." Evidently, he meant on those occasions when you don't have a
good stiletto handy.

A few minutes later we're treated to a scene still more troublesome. The government
has already been toppled and its villainous architects killed. And yet, Parliament must
still be blown up, fulfilling Fawkes's 400-year-old dream but no other discernable
purpose. Tchaikovsky's notes swell anew as orange flames shatter the tall windows of
Westminster and hurl the clock faces from Big Ben. The only explanation we're offered
is V's earlier admonition that "a building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it....
blowing up a building can change the world." This is inarguably true, as two separate al
Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Towers amply demonstrated. (It is a resonance to
which V for Vendetta is either sadly oblivious or perversely attracted.) In detonating
Westminster, the Wachowskis and McTeigue go at once too far and not far enough: too
far, in expecting us to applaud the senseless destruction of one of the historic
cathedrals of democracy; and not far enough, in hesitating to make their point by
blowing up the White House or the Capitol dome, the true targets of their juvenile
political ire. Their film is a bank shot against Bush, simultaneously radical and cowardly.
In the end it's not clear which characteristic is the more embarrassing.