V for Vendetta
Something is wrong in the totalitarian state of England. Actually, everything is wrong: minorities, gays, and "radical" protesters have disappeared into death camps, the secret police known as "fingermen" rule the night, and the population has been bludgeoned into sheeplike compliance by wall-to-wall disaster reports in the media. The face of the rabid fascist leader Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt) looms from posters and TV screens, and you can almost taste the spittle from his lips.
"V for Vendetta" wants you to wonder how much of this sounds familiar, and, worse, how much of it might become familiar with a few twists of history's tail. Then it wants you to root for the masked man who plans to blow it all up. Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter, and what, exactly, defines the difference? The Wachowski brothers think they know. Anyone who gives thought to the matter may respond with one of their screenplay's favorite words: Bollocks.
Still, there's more on this movie's mind than the usual wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am the trailers are promising. In adapting the groundbreaking early-'80s comic book series by writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd (since collected in paperback; it's well worth the read), Andy and Larry Wachowski of "The Matrix" fame are betting that multiplex audiences are ready for a propulsive Orwellian drama disguised as an action flick. They've made a mainstream provocation at a time when we could use one -- even a muddled one -- and for that, they should probably be thanked.
Ever the prickly iconoclast, Moore has had his name removed from the film, but while "V for Vendetta" makes many changes to his story line, it does no essential violence to the work as a whole. A mysterious figure known only as V (Hugo Weaving) still rises from his shadowy lair to visit butt-kicking death upon various minions of the state: a bombastic right-wing TV host (Roger Allam), an archbishop (John Standing) with a thing for young girls.
V still wears a mask that evokes both Guy Fawkes (who plotted to blow up Parliament in 1605) and Edmund Dantes, the count of Monte Cristo. He still takes under his wing a fearful young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) and teaches her to see the true enemy (he gets her to take the red pill, in other words), and he still talks a mellifluous blue streak that worked better on the page.
There's a good-hearted policeman named Finch (Stephen Rea), who with his loyal assistant (Rupert Graves) works to uncover V's grim back story against the advice of head fingerman Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith) and Sutler himself. The trail leads to a secret experimental camp and a rueful lady scientist played touchingly by Sinead Cusack. It also leads to images of human bodies steamrollered into pits and covered with quicklime. The Wachowskis are playing with the gloves off.
In point of fact, the brothers have only produced and written "V for Vendetta," handing the directorial reins to "Matrix" assistant director James McTeigue. Regardless of who did what, the movie's a handsome piece of work, dramatically powerful even when it backs into silliness. The strongest sequences are lifted almost intact from the comic: the imprisonment and torture that harden Evey while freeing her soul, a flashback to the sad story of Valerie Banks (Natasha Wightman), movie star and victim of the state.
Even while the movie is set in a post-apocalyptic day after tomorrow -- America, we're told, has fallen into chaos after the war it started enveloped the world -- its concerns are of the moment. Specifically: What rights might a terrified populace give up in the name of promised safety, and how might a government wield that fear to its advantage? Some will praise or condemn the movie's message as an attack on Bush-ism run amok (Alan Moore was responding to Margaret Thatcher, actually), but that's too easy. The real villain is a cowed and lazy citizenry. Meaning all of us.
Disappointingly, "V for Vendetta" makes this point early and moves on, at some point turning as shallow as what it protests against. (Let's pause to remember, for one thing, that Fawkes wanted to blow up Parliament so he could install a Catholic king on the throne. Freedom for the masses wasn't high on his to-do list.) The film comes close to being the inspired piece of agit-pop it's aiming for, and the performances are first-rate: Portman, both with hair and without, atones for the woodenness of Queen Amidala, and Weaving -- well, he gives good voice behind that mask.
In the end, though, the Wachowskis' love of freedom -- of, in Moore's words, that 1 inch no one can ever take from us -- is trumped by their love of watching things go boom. Spoiler alert (except to those who've been following news of the movie over the last few months): "V for Vendetta" ends with the destruction of the Houses of Parliament -- conveniently empty, unlike the London underground trains and buses of July 7, 2005. The movie offers this as an intentionally controversial celebratory sequence, after which the faceless crowds stand revealed at last in their beautiful individuality.
That's a bravura image, yet you're forgiven if you find yourself pondering the individuality of real-life victims. Shortly after the planes smashed into the World Trade towers five years ago -- after my daughter had come home from her Brooklyn school clutching a burnt memo that had blown across the river -- I wrote that I hoped never again to see a movie in which buildings blew up. I was referring to an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, but charges of irresponsibility can apply to a movie of ideas as well, if those ideas are glib. "V for Vendetta" says that terrorism's OK as long as no one really gets hurt, and to believe that, you need the wishful thinking of a child. Unfortunately, the world has grown up since Alan Moore set pen to paper. One wonders if the fan-boys ever will.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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