Tyranny and Violence
Mar. 21st, 2006 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77After all of the reviews and controversy, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by V for Vendetta:
The film follows the narrative of the graphic novel much more closely than I'd been led to expect, and to the extent that the filmmakers deviated from that template, it was to make the material more relevant to present-day concerns: whereas Alan Moore's original story belongs very much to the world of Thatcherite Britain, the film is understandably more engaged with the politics of Bush and Blair's "War on Terror." But the core of the story remains unchanged: as in the novel, the setting is a dystopian, dictatorial future Britain, where the regime's most serious enemy is the elegant, urbane, and quite murderous V, who acts as a sort of one-man French Resistance.
V's methods might be doubtful, but the only functioning alternative the film offers is Finch, an apolitical cop trying to do his job under the aegis of a profoundly cruel and corrupt system. Finch seems a decent guy, but his constabulary spadework doesn't even begin to deal with injustices raining down all around him. Peaceful protestors are, needless to say, nowhere to be seen--having long since been rounded up and disposed of. And, if V and Finch are morally ambiguous characters, John Hurt's fascistic Chancellor Sutler might as well be Ming the Merciless. So, if heroes are in short supply, it's not hard to decide who to be against, in this movie.
But who to sympathize with? Trapped behind V's mask, Hugo Weaving is little more than a voice-actor, and he doesn't so much develop as reveal--alternately inspiring and disturbing--layers of himself during the course of the narrative. Stephen Rea's Finch gradually comes to grips with the fact that the problems around him run deeper than the individual crimes that he's investigating, but he doesn't seem to know what else to do. Again, as in the graphic novel, Natalie Portman's Evey Hammond provides the only truly sympathetic character, and the only one who develops significantly, making a harrowing journey from frightened victim to confident, articulate, unrepentant rebel.
The film's failings are pretty much those that you'd expect:
Of course, the treatment of political violence is simplistic: as I've said about the comic book V in a prior post, the cinematic version's terrorist tactics have an unrealistically "surgical" effect, bringing low only the guilty. Those seeking a more thoughtful cinematic portrayal of both terrorism and creeping authoritarianism might do well to check out Joseph Castelo's The War Within, which doesn't give either a free pass.
And![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morganminstrel was right to suspect that the Gunpowder Plot (which inspires much of V's campaign against the Sutler, et al) would be handled in misleading and ahistorical ways. It is.
Still, as an entertainment, I much preferred V for Vendetta to the Warchowski brothers' previous work on the Matrix films.
The film follows the narrative of the graphic novel much more closely than I'd been led to expect, and to the extent that the filmmakers deviated from that template, it was to make the material more relevant to present-day concerns: whereas Alan Moore's original story belongs very much to the world of Thatcherite Britain, the film is understandably more engaged with the politics of Bush and Blair's "War on Terror." But the core of the story remains unchanged: as in the novel, the setting is a dystopian, dictatorial future Britain, where the regime's most serious enemy is the elegant, urbane, and quite murderous V, who acts as a sort of one-man French Resistance.
V's methods might be doubtful, but the only functioning alternative the film offers is Finch, an apolitical cop trying to do his job under the aegis of a profoundly cruel and corrupt system. Finch seems a decent guy, but his constabulary spadework doesn't even begin to deal with injustices raining down all around him. Peaceful protestors are, needless to say, nowhere to be seen--having long since been rounded up and disposed of. And, if V and Finch are morally ambiguous characters, John Hurt's fascistic Chancellor Sutler might as well be Ming the Merciless. So, if heroes are in short supply, it's not hard to decide who to be against, in this movie.
But who to sympathize with? Trapped behind V's mask, Hugo Weaving is little more than a voice-actor, and he doesn't so much develop as reveal--alternately inspiring and disturbing--layers of himself during the course of the narrative. Stephen Rea's Finch gradually comes to grips with the fact that the problems around him run deeper than the individual crimes that he's investigating, but he doesn't seem to know what else to do. Again, as in the graphic novel, Natalie Portman's Evey Hammond provides the only truly sympathetic character, and the only one who develops significantly, making a harrowing journey from frightened victim to confident, articulate, unrepentant rebel.
The film's failings are pretty much those that you'd expect:
Of course, the treatment of political violence is simplistic: as I've said about the comic book V in a prior post, the cinematic version's terrorist tactics have an unrealistically "surgical" effect, bringing low only the guilty. Those seeking a more thoughtful cinematic portrayal of both terrorism and creeping authoritarianism might do well to check out Joseph Castelo's The War Within, which doesn't give either a free pass.
And
morganminstrel was right to suspect that the Gunpowder Plot (which inspires much of V's campaign against the Sutler, et al) would be handled in misleading and ahistorical ways. It is.Still, as an entertainment, I much preferred V for Vendetta to the Warchowski brothers' previous work on the Matrix films.
