V versus W: No Betta Vendetta

Rating: 9/10 (9 August 2011)

Conjuring icons and tableaux from humanity's last four millennia (including Guy Fawkes, The Phantom of the Opera, Shakespeare, Huxley's Brave New World, Batman, Nazism, The Man With No Name, and a thousand other quasi-plagiarisms), V FOR VENDETTA is a confluence of electric ideas and wolfen imagery that will burn itself into the cortexes of this politically-tepid generation as Orwell's 1984 was burned into previous generations.
It may even make them do what today's society would rather they didn't: think.
Whereas 1984, published in 1949, heralded the pessimism of a far-flung future, where civil liberties were nonexistent, where government held tyrannical sway over citizens' very thoughts, manufacturing fear through canards and strong-arming via automaton Thought Police, the horror of VENDETTA's vision is that it reflects not a distant future, but the PRESENT.
Sure, it is clothed in a fiction; of a Britain gone Beyond Big Brother, where pseudo-police called Finger Men are given carte blanche to do with suspects as they please, including cold-blooded murder and rape; where the government can manufacture a virus, release it into the public, and then use the cure as election leverage, and where elected officials have stakes in the company that sells the cure - but how is this any different from a President and his cronies profiteering from a manufactured war that costs millions of lives, holding stakes in all the weapons and oil conglomerates involved?
Just as superheroes were originally created in reaction to their social climate (Zorro, to fight the tyranny of the Spanish Californian governor; Superman, as escapist vision after the Great Depression; Captain America, to give Hitler a good old American Right Hook every so often - all three of these icons also evoked by this film), VENDETTA's hero, simply known as "V," is a superhero for OUR times, fighting for the same ideals as his predecessors, ramped up to 2000s ferocity.
Wearing a permanent Guy Fawkes facemask, V (Hugo Weaving) takes his cue from Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Houses of Parliament), motivated by the same premise - to overthrow a corrupt government. Fawkes was foiled on November 5 (hence the rhyme, "Remember, remember, the fifth of NovemberÂ…"). V is also the only surviving guinea pig from the manufacture of the lethal government virus, which necessitated his facemask and Bat-Zorro outfit. Hence his vendetta - against all his captors, now occupying political positions.
Departing from the storyline and ideologies of Alan Moore's and David Lloyd's graphic novel from which it was lifted, writers Andy and Larry Wachowski script VENDETTA in a society of 2020, but quite easily evoke a society likely in existence today: there is nary a doubt that this is George W. Bush's dystopian America. To take the edge off the scythe, the British government stands as allegory for the U.S. government, America having been nullified as a world power in a recent war.
On the November 5th night we meet V, he rescues Evey (Natalie Portman), just before he blows the Old Bailey courts, to the strains of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, promising in a pirated television broadcast to do the same to the Houses of Parliament next year.
Upon V's first appearance as the suavely lethal, black-caped vigilante, loquacious to a fault, my heart actually beat faster - at last!: a character intelligent, articulate and adept at weaponry - who is not the British Bad Guy. At long last, a truly knowledgeable and literate protagonist wins the day, not some disheveled cop or loudmouth devil-brat who teaches his parents how to love again. A Hero whose abode is piled high with books, where art and learning - not a big screen TV or sports memorabilia - are given pride of place; without the snide implication that knowledge equals nerd equals FRASIER.
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH - Orwell, 1984.
In the most ironic casting since Moses became the head of the NRA, John Hurt (who played the failed rebel Winston Smith, in the film version of 1984) overlords this totalitarian social order as Supreme Chancellor Sutler, whose every ranting breath from wall-sized TV monitors is channeled into policy through his armed regimes of thoughtless drogues. (How is this any different to a President who can sign a bill against torture and then use torture whenever he feels like it; who can progress a war effort without the legal approval of congress?) A small coterie of officials report to the Chancellor, for weekly doses of intimidation, among them, Finch (Stephen Rea), doing the "disheveled cop who finds his conscience" routine, and Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith) as the cop who doesn't have one.
Natalie Portman, who seems to have a proclivity for morally-ambiguous super killers - Leon, Darth Vader, and now V - effectively wipes away the stain of STAR WARS with this performance. I am in love again. Hugo Weaving, eternally hidden behind V's mask, lets his unseen elocution fly daggers, and is doubly commended for the fact that he is so clearly understood even without the benefit of seeing his moving lips.
"Behind this mask, there is an Idea. And Ideas are bulletproof."
Watch any episode of REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER and the occasional guest Republican will stand their ground like a braying ass, defending their pedestrian President against incompetence and duplicity against all evidence to the contrary. If there is one unquestioning drogue like that, there are thousands. An Idea being bulletproof unfortunately works both ways.
"The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous."
This film is a cry out to the intelligentsia of the planet to hold fast - in one way or another, justice is coming in a long black cape...