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Head to Head
Rob's Head March 20, 2006 A Few Thoughts on V for Vendetta More than a few, I suppose... When I watch a movie adapted from a comic book, I don't compare it against the books, make sure they have everything just right, or act like a fanboy in any other way. V for Vendetta is actually more like an adaptation of a novel since it's a limited series without the decades of mythos that Spider-Man or the X-Men have, but the principle is still the same. Some things work better in a movie than they do in another medium, and vice versa. Obviously, I don't have to tell you this. It was hard for me to do that with V for Vendetta. I love V for Vendetta, I have for a long time. It affected my thinking when I was younger, and while I'm not running around advocating an anarchist revolution, the message of the comic book has stayed with me for a while. What I was watching for in the movie wasn't faithfulness to the original plot, but a maintainance of the integrity of the theme of the original story. I don't know that it did. V for Vendetta is a difficult and ambitious project to take on here and now. Sensibilities in the 80's were different than they are now. It's impossible for us to watch scenes of mass destruction without looking at it through the prism of 9/11, like it or not. It's the elephant in the theater in any big action movie where something blows up, and even more so in V for Vendetta. Five years later, people will go and see a movie like V for Vendetta, but I think there's a collective demand among the audience that you better come up with a pretty fucking good reason to blow up Parliament. That's what most of the movie amounted to for me: selling the audience on why V blows up Parliament. In the comic books, blowing up Parliament is the first thing he does. What that does is tell you what V's about from the start. He takes out the most recognizable symbol of government in England and spends the rest of the story taking out the rest of the power structure. The reader knows what he's about and has to buy into V's belief system immediately. Blowing up Old Bailey and its statue of justice isn't the same. (Not to keep comparing the book and the movie, but there's a great scene in the comic book where V excoriates the statue, symbolizing justice, his old love, for cheating on him with the totalitarian government. He explains that he's found a new love, anarchy). I don't know if they really did explain it. The government seemed shitty, no doubt, but I didn't feel like they did a good job conveying the fear of the people living their everyday lives under Norsefire and the High Chancellor. The best they do is the letter from Valerie, which is fucking great both in the movie and the book. But I don't know if that scene really brings home how the average person feels under this regime (though it's clear that geeky little girls aren't a big fan of the High Chancellor). The flashbacks and news stories try to show how the slow erosion of our civil liberties and our willingness to trade them for security can lead to totalitarianism, but in an age where the majority of Americans think it's okay for the President to ignore the law if he thinks he needs to for public safety, I don't know how well that works. The other problem is that a lot of V's philosophy is missing from the movie. V isn't supposed to just want to rage against the machine, he believes in a new order. He's an anarchist, who believes that the people should govern themselves. I think a little more of his thought would've gone a long way to justifying his actions. There was an article in the New Yorker this week where David Denby pointed out that "the Wachowskis have stumbled into celebrating an attack against an icon of liberal democracy." It's a valid point. V for Vendetta is supposed to be an allegory, but we live in a time when this stuff seems to real. They did say that irony died on 9/11. Still, I don't know, you have to be a fairly prissy establishmentarian not to even get the slightest charge out of watching a symbol of authority go boom. What's the scene everyone remembers best from Independence Day? It's in our nature to rebel. It's also in our nature to want to be safe. We're complicated people. That's a tension that V for Vendetta exploits very well through Evey. The Wachowskis really pussed out by changing Evey's curfew breaking escapades from an attempt to being a career in prostitution to a relatively innocent late-night tryst, but whatever. I liked everything else about Evey. Yeah, she bailed on V at the bishop's, but seriously, what the fuck would you do? She's V's human counterpart, the one who doesn't have the luxury of superpowers and a batcave. She has to make harder decisions, and when she finally does come back to V and his plan, you feel like it means something. Presumably, she's a stand-in for all the other normal people of London who eventually put on their masks and go celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. If there was one thing the movie had over the book, that was it. I'm a sucker for cheap sentimentality, and maybe that's all it was, but I got chills when the army of V's marched to Parliament. Even if that had been in the book, the visual of all those people on the move would've still beat out the representation in the book. As for V himself, eh. Not bad, but I always imagined him with a little more panache. But I get that it's hard to get a hold of that character in real life, so I'll give it a pass. It's a tough movie to judge. I can't really say whether or not they pulled it off. In that New Yorker piece, the Denby wanted to ask the Wachowskis, "What in the world are you doing?" I can see that. Myself, knowing what V is all about previously, I bought it. But I don't think the movie stands on it's own. It's a very good companion piece to the book, but without it, there are too many important parts of the story and the meaning that you're missing. John's Head March 22, 2006
God is in the rain I confess: I've made three attempts over the years to read "V for Vendetta." I could never get past chapter 3 or 4. I don't know what my problem is, but it's my problem, not Alan Moore's. Still, I know more about "V" than the moviegoer who has never read or heard of the graphic novel. With that in mind, while I liked V for Vendetta the motion picture just fine, I couldn't help but wish Stanley Kubrick were alive and had directed it. The material is dense, grim, subversive, and cerebral. I'm not certain the modern style of comic book-slash-action movie was the best way to service the material. V for Vendetta should have been this century's Clockwork Orange. V would have been transcendant with that type of presentation, instead of what it is: good enough, but not great. Of course, a Kubrickian V without the Wachowski brothers's pedigree likely wouldn't have made $26-million on its opening weekend. I think what I was disappointed in the most was the lack of stylization with which V was depicted. There were only two shots that delivered what I was looking for visually: one where V, his black cloak swirling dramatically, leaps onto the church rooftop on his way to kill the bishop - an image straight out of a comic book panel. The second was V spectrally appearing in the shadows as he waited to kill the coroner who'd once imprisoned him. The rest of the time, V just sort of stood around. When he cooked Evey breakfast, it looked like a guy in a Halloween mask was hosting a Food Network cooking show. They should have showed V cleaning his bathroom in full costume too, waxing philosophically about the best cleansers to get rid of hard water and mildew stains in the shower. V for Vendetta had as many "radical" and "dangerous" political ideas as a Lucky Charms box has red moons, orange stars, green clovers, blue diamonds and purple horse shoes. Most of what the movie had to say was interesting on the surface and compelling if deeply explored, but if you felt like deeply exploring, the movie generally left you on your own after kicking you in the ass to move you along. There were a lot of ideas floating around in the movie. It was like one of those wind chambers that blow money around while you stand in it. The ideas were basically the money and whatever you felt like grabbing was yours to keep. Still, it was reasonably clear what V's basic agenda was and the dynamic backstory of how V and the fascist government of High Chancellor Adam Sutler came into being was explained well. The movie did certain things better than any comic book - written by Alan Moore or not - could ever do. Evey was much, much hotter in the movie than in the graphic novel. I suppose so was V, for that matter. And Chancellor Sutler too. Rrowrr. The Million V March that climaxed the movie was more powerful on film than even your mind's eye could deliver while reading the graphic novel. And I loved the Benny Hill stuff. Benny Hill music should be in every movie; in Munich, Crash, Brokeback Mountain... Especially Brokeback Mountain. Natalie Portman was the best thing in the movie. Top critics have complained about her British accent. I didn't mind it, don't care. She was great. I love her. (The Closer grudge is dead and buried.) She anchored every scene she was in. She hammered home all the emotion and did the work for two in her scenes with V due to the restrictions of V's mask.. She never caught a break, never had a form of laughter or release - she didn't even get to laugh at the Benny Hill stuff. The sequence where Evey is captured, tortured by V, and discovers the letter of the dead lesbian is the most riveting of the entire picture. (Although, going back to an earlier complaint, when Evey is being shaved bald, you feel the sympathy for Evey entirely because of Portman's performance but a great director like the late Kubrick would have gone further, would have been able to make us feel her pain as if it were our heads also being shaved.) Evey standing in the rain after earning her freedom from fear and understanding what it means that God is in the rain is the most moving moment in a motion picture released thus far in 2006.
Hugo Weaving did remarkably empathetic work from behind the rubber Guy Fawkes mask. At times, V speaking bordered dangerously close to the Green Goblin talking to Spider-Man on the rooftop of the first Spidey movie, but Weaving succeeded in making you feel and believe V. Though the reveal was inelegantly handled, I did like V's elaborate ruse of kidnapping and torturing Evey. Although I didn't quite buy V's explanation for torturing her. V: "Evey, I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to string you up by your wrists, strip you naked and hose you down like you were headed for the gas chamber. You must believe me: It took everything I had not to hose you from your front. And to use a real hose." Then again, after the immolation he lived through, V's penis must be burnt even worse than Kane's. Still, since "living without fear" is the same lesson, Liam Neeson should have done the same thing to Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins. Joel Schumacher would have thought that was fabulous.
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