Feast for the Eyes More Than the Mind

Rating: 8/10 (3 April 2006)

Since the almost 60 years since George Orwell's vision of "1984" we were due for an updated re-imagining of fascism and "V for Vendetta" comes close.
While it borrows far too much old-fashioned Nazi and Big Brother iconography and methodology for a paranoid future where disease has crippled the first world and chaos has brought in an ostensibly fundamentalist Christian totalitarian regime over Britain, the flashy production and sound design and snazzy editing mostly keeps us from realizing this is less about political revolution and more about personal vengeance, as if it's an addition to Chan-wook Park's trilogy ("Oldboy" etc.), which also borrowed heavily from "The Count of Monte Cristo" or like the anti-homophobe revengeful serial killer in the TV mini-series "Epitafios (Epitaphs)".
All of the power mongers, unfortunately, are seen more for their personal peccadilloes and homophobic theology, which makes them like hysterical updates from the Salem witch trials of "The Crucible". John Hurt as the big screen "Chancellor" seems too much like the Wizard of Oz thundering away with smoke and mirrors (and ironically contradicting his rebel role in a filmed version of "Nineteen Eighty-Four") and browbeating his underlings much like we saw Hitler in "Downfall (Der Untergang)", though they are lit more dramatically in the dark. Scarier would have been a more insidious contemporary fear-monger, like the cynically folksy Andy Griffith in "A Face in the Crowd". There is amusing satire of media manipulation and a Fox News type egomaniacal, rabble rousing TV commentator watching himself adoringly in mirrors. Sinead Cusack adds needed gravity as a haunted doctor.
The most intellectually captivating story angle, visually revealed through flashbacks that relieve talky explication, is a greedy "Syriana"-like corporate conspiracy at the heart of the politics (or "The Constant Gardener" as it's pharmaceutical companies) that is investigated by a craggily persistent Stephen Rea as an old-fashioned cop (reminding me of the career police officer who found himself a Nazi interrogator in the docu-drama "Sophie Scholl - The Final Days (Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage)").
Hugo Weaving has the difficult task of doing virtually an audiobook version of the movie, as he is masked in all but one scene, but his voice is marvelous throughout, particularly in his introductory monologue of V words. Flashy editing of his actions helps give him more expressiveness, including "The Matrix"-like effects emblematic of writer/producers the Wachowsks. It was very effective that "V" craftily brainwashes his minions into sacrificial fearlessness as much as the manipulative puppeteers of suicide bombers in "Paradise Now". His controversial climatic goal for inciting hope is actually a bit confusing in its intent and seems to confuse Kristallnacht with the bombing of the Reichstag as acts of rebellion, to continue the film's overt Nazi parallels. But "V's own final battle brilliantly uses imagery from Ned Kelly's revolutionary stand that still spurs Australian nationalism.
His and Stephen Fry's parallel collection of rescued masterpieces from "the vaults of the Ministry of Objectionable Material" just seemed isolationistically nostalgic (complete with a constant symbolic background painting like a Renaissance Annunciation of a savior and a lot of Shakespeare quotes) and had little of the sense of comparative priorities we saw in John Frankenheimer's "The Train " which tensely weighed lives against the French art heritage.
Natalie Portman's English accent is annoyingly, ungeographically bland and inconsistent but her visuals are so dynamic, especially with her eyes, that I was only distracted in unemotional scenes.
Which is true of the whole film - that the visuals are so powerful they outweigh any thinking