A Cinephile’s Critiques

Directed by James McTeigue, 2006 (Color, 7:3, Surround, 130′)
Starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, and John Hurt

It’s easy to see why someone would want to make this film. It’s got a comic-book hero, a terrorist, a pedophiliac priest, a reactionary talk-show host, a repressive government, and landmarks being blown up. What it’s no so easy to see, however, is why, when given the chance to play around with these elements, the filmmakers would pass up the opportunity to do something more interesting with them than just stir them together and hope for the best.

V for Vendetta’s not a particularly bad film, but it’s not a very good one either. The hero, named V, speaks in verse when he’s not alliterating. He’s been horribly disfigured, so he wears a grinning mask all the time. He tortures his only real ally because she says she doesn’t want to be frightened anymore. He thinks the way to shake people out of their apathy is to blow up buildings. And, he has a few scores to settle. Sounds like an interesting guy, right?

Well, no, not really. He’s not nearly as interesting as Edmond Dantés, even though he does really like that old movie, The Count of Monte Cristo. And, Guy Fawkes, the man V’s mask is modeled on, displays more emotional depth in the few minutes he has in this story than V does in the rest of the film. I understand V’s supposed to be an emotionally burned-out shell of a man, but, well, that doesn’t really come across either.

Evey and the cop are the characters that drive the story. They’re people, and through them we get to see what’s going on around there. Yes, it turns out to be even worse than it initially appears.

And, yes, it looks a lot like an exaggeration of some of the things going on in the U.S. right now. Yes, the story, written a couple decades ago, was originally intended to be an exaggeration of Thatcher’s government in Great Britain. Yes, the exaggerations look a lot like the things that happened in Germany, or Russia, not too much earlier. Yes, these things still happen, not only here and now, but just about anywhere, and anytime, social institutions decide that their goals are more important than the people who will end up suffering to advance those goals.

There’s nothing really controversial in all that, and there’s also nothing particularly controversial about the targets the film selected. The corporate-sponsored theocracy in V for Vendetta is both familiar and, unarguably, despicable. There’s also nothing very controversial with the way the general populace is depicted. They know something’s wrong. They know they’re being told BS. They don’t like it, and, just like us, they can’t be bothered to do much more than shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, change the subject, and try not to think about it too much.

I suspect the only real controversy this film was intended to generate, and it was certainly promoted as a provocative film, concerned the methods its hero practices. He’s a serial killer. He holds people hostage. He tortures people. He sets off bombs. But, hey, since the things he’s fighting against are horrible, isn’t that justified?

Well, okay, let’s take that notion seriously and think about it for a moment. How often do methods like those create a situation less repressive than the situation that inspired the violence? With all the books he has in his grotto, you’d think V would’ve known the answer.

The answer is … almost never. The film, perhaps unintentionally, even shows us that. How did the repressive group in V for Vendetta come into power? Well, someone, and I won’t reveal who, did exactly the sort of things V does, and the populace thought that was reason enough for tolerating repression.