Sky K Studios Movie Blog

V for Vendetta

I feel bad for V for Vendetta. It would not seem easy for a movie to fail by being at once too faithful and not faithful enough to its source material, by being too handsome and not handsome enough, and by being too smart and not smart enough, but V has done it. Maybe it was the fault of the man two seats down from me who shushed me during the preview for An American Haunting ("Ken Burns' Poltercrap!" I may have shouted), but the very expensive-looking thing on screen never even rose to the level of fourteen-year-old boy opening-night excitement.

It's easy enough to fail by not sticking to the source material, and Alan Moore's pre-emptive refusal to participate—he took his name off it before it was made, based on what had happened to other movies—seemed bratty and prima-donnaish, though, in the end, correct. It's more interesting to me how the source material bogs down the movie.

For starters, the titular terrorist V wears a Guy Fawkes mask through the whole movie. On the page, the frozen smile of the mask is iconic and haunting, depersonalizing the revolutionary ardor of V into a free-floating cloud of question and dissent that gets inside Evey and fuels her transformation. On the screen, however, it's as if Natalie Portman has to fight, love, and hide alongside King Friday from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood for two hours. He doesn't really give a lot back, and he's a bad kisser.

The nature of V's resistance also seems better on the page of a comic book than blown up on the screen. V doesn't lead a slave rebellion: the film never quite makes up its mind whether the whole populace is suffering under the government's heavy boots, or whether a few outgroups suffer in secret gulags to justify the complacence and security of a middle class that doesn't take its government too seriously. The book, though it leans more towards the first scenario than the movie does, never solves this problem, but on a structural level, a comic leaves more up to the imagination than a film does. It's not just that there's more activity for the mind between the panels on a page than there is between the 29 frames per second; it's also that a big-budget film defaults to Triumph of the Will before your eyes in a way that a little-known graphic novel becomes Common Sense in your hands. A scrappy little thing can be inspiring and open-ended in a way that a heavily CGI'd extravaganza, twenty feet tall and luminous (I do love the Arclight) reifies and beautifies the violence of both the state and its antagonist.

Not to mention that the things just falls down at the level of storytelling. It's an action movie in which Hugo Weaving's V never comes into physical jeopardy, a police procedural in which Stephen Rea's unanswered questions never tantalize, a romance in which Natalie Portman's yearning never approaches the physical. It was opening night at the Arclight, and I never once whooped or hollered.

Except during the trailers. Can't wait for Take the Lead! ("You put your chocolate tango in my hip-hop peanut butter," I may have muttered.)

UPDATE: All is forgiven, Natalie.

posted by Josh K-sky at 1:02 PM