Q for Qualified Success

This is a copy-paste job of musings from my personal file; it dates from about a month prior, so the odd current-events reference might nonplus. I'd been wanting to see the film again with a friend of mine who's musical expertise I might consult; sadly, she bailed on me so many times it hardly seems worth trying again. Sadly, because I think she'd have loved it as much as me.

Read some reviews looking for answers this morning after Phil's Grandson's Place but everything in the ten or so I looked at (mixed bag of positives and negatives) was at the intellectual level of a small child and boasted wordsmithery and prose like in kind (just head over here to see how true it is!). I guess I have to write my own.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

So goes an English nursery rhyme, the lighter and more memorable counterpart to the Gunpowder Plot Sermons that began in 1606, annual admonitions against the kind of treason that saw Guy Fawkes drawn and quartered after 5 November, 1605.

So also opens "V for Vendetta": equal parts cloak and dagger intrigue, revenge flick, comic book, lyrical poem, preposterous polemic. It might not be totally accurate to say the film had me at "Remember", but I shall state my bias outright: by the time the man in the leering mask manifests an inhuman talent for alliteration, in the first few minutes of the first reel, I no longer care how good the movie is -- I love it. My hero isn't Evey, an especially innocent-looking Natalie Portman who is, by general consensus of critics everywhere, both a proxy for the audience and the deliverer of an Oscar-calibre performance (though I'm not sure I agree). My hero is V, the English Cyrano de Bergerac. My point of view is his.

V is mad, hence the title. He wants to topple a totalitarian British government of the near future by whacking a few guys he hates and fomenting an uprising of the people of London. He's Maximus Decimus Meridius if you put "Gladiator" in a time warp; he's a liberal democrat with a serious grudge. He's also, apparently, a terrorist.

He's so labelled by the "High Chancellor" (what's the name of that country that's always calling its head of state "Chancellor" again?) which I suppose is natural given that any regime needs a noun for "outlaw" -- assuming "outlaw" won't do. Given the world's political climate today, and the film's not-so-thinly-veiled agenda, the word's a peculiar choice, though. What truly grates is how unquestioningly it is picked up and carried by every reviewer I have read. To take just one random sample of the numbskulls reviewing pictures these days, John DeFore at "The Hollywood Reporter" calls "Vendetta" 'a movie whose heroes are terrorists'.

V might be a vigilante who dials "M" for Murder but a terrorist he is not. If you give a year's advance warning before demolishing the Houses of Parliament, V might be for Vandal, but if you're going to get worked up about the destruction of such a storied piece of real estate, doesn't most of the guilt lie on the shoulders of a security force so dumb (like, film critic dumb) they can't even protect a few contiguous city blocks from one man when given 365 days advance warning? Likewise, blowing up the Old Bailey at midnight might be mean, but it's not exactly the same as driving an airliner full of civilians into the twin towers on a work day.

Unfortunately, the Wachowski brothers seem to be pushing the bankrupt thesis that "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" when this just isn't so. Terrorism is well-defined. It consists in the targeted butchery of civilians as an end in itself. Car bombing a school full of children or blowing up pregnant women and the elderly on a bus makes you a terrorist. V's a saboteur, a killer and, arguably maybe, a murderer; he's not a terrorist.

Vendetta is capably photographed by British cinematographer Adrian Biddle (BSC, credits include "Alien", "Willow", "Thelma & Louise", "Event Horizon"), who died in London of a heart attack near the close of 2005. Rich blacks, whites, and crimsons. The government's agencies are cold blues, while V's home is warm sepia. The rest is night and shadows. The score, by Dario Marianelli is unassuming compared to the phenomenal, haunting, original score for "Pride & Prejudice". Sombre string timbres abound, sometimes accompanied by martial percussion and brass or a reedy, melancholy oboe -- and "Pride"'s beautiful piano is nowhere to be heard. Music supports action on screen without every really stepping into the light.

What irked me was a use of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth (get it? V, 5?). My Naxos recording is bad enough -- it takes 1:25 to get through the 110 measures of the exposition but even if you can't read the bloody metronome markings (108 half notes to a minute), the tempo markings on the score say "allegro con brio". Con Bloody Brio! With Spirit! Not only does the plodding rendition suck the soul out of the symphony, it sucks the drama from the scene. Doing it slow doesn't make it sinister -- it puts it to sleep. More likely than not the blame for this lies with the Wachowskis or some uncredited Music Supervisor rather than Marianelli.

It might be only coincedence that the lyrics to Arthur Hamilton's "Cry Me a River", played several times on V's mighty Wurlitzer, contain a little verbal "remember remember" motif not too dissimilar from the opening rhyme, but more interesting is the final piece of non-original music -- Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" which, lofting high above the city from its hijacked loudspeakers, underscores the razings of the Bailey and of Parliament.

While it's hardly likely the filmmakers chose "1812" because it, too, suffered under a repressive police state -- Soviet censors tore the "God Save the Tsar" theme from it and inserted "Glory" from Glinka's opera "Ivan Susanin" -- and (who knows?) the choice could be as shallow as the piece's nowadays ubiquity on Fourth of July celebrations accompanied by cannon fire and fireworks, another reason suggests itself. Tchaikovsky is pretty generally believed to have been a homosexual, and one thread that runs through "Bound", the "Matrix" trilogy, and Vendetta is the Wachowskis' obsession with lesbians, sadomasochism, and all manner of sexual abnormality. It is said that Laurence Wachowski's divorce resulted from his relationship with a Los Angeles dominatrix and rumours abound that, as "Lana" or "Linda", the recluse is now taking hormones in preparation for an attempted physical sex change operation.

Some reviewers, notably Victoria Alexander, ask whether V's fans will support "his obvious gay-themed persona" but I see nothing to substantiate the suggestion. His relationship with Evey is platonic of necessity but it is obvious from the first that he loves her and as the story ends that she loves him. Rather, the Wachowski obsession comes out in a drawn-out flashback midway through the second act that quickly bogs down into a painful political sermon, and in the character of Deitrich (ably played by Stephen Fry), a gay talk show host who is forced to solicit the society of young women to keep his secret but is done in in the end (of all the irony) by a Qu'ran in his posession.

It seems that under the maniacal Chancellor Sutler, whose name could probably be a little subtler (John Hurt, no relation to the American William), the future is not friendly for Muslims and gays. As the two most prominent suppressed identity groups in the film, it's worth pointing out for the umpteenth time what peculiar bedfellows they make, the one group being more antagonistic to the other than any Western nation on the face of the earth. Regardless, in the film both Muslims and homosexuals face persecution and murder.

At this point, the premise of the dystopian mis-en-scène is unravelling. After all, on any given weekend more British Muslims go to mosques than fill the pews of the Church of England. Even if Great Britain did revert to being a forcefully Christian nation, one would expect that the most influential bishops would be Anglicans; the bulk of the nation's Catholics live in Ireland, not London. It seems the Wachowskis made their man a Catholic for no other reason than a cheap confession gimmick. Leaving religion by the way, I notice that Dell Computer's shares closed at $USD 29.85 on the NASDAQ this afternoon, leaving the company with a market capitalization of some 74-odd billion dollars. Now Dell is headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, with central manufacturing facilities in Austin. It trades on the NASDAQ, whose Broadway headquarters I've walked past in New York. To expect me to believe that Dell maintains a thriving export business to Sutlerian London while America is ripping itself to shreds in Civil War II is pure screenwriting laziness, but Joel Silver's marketing people make sure every LCD in sight is emblazoned with a Dell logo all the same.

The business of a Thatcheresque "conservative" party turning into Commy-Nazis* (though having lived under neither kind of fascism, the portraits of Sutler on the wall first bring Yoweri Museveni to mind for me) is of course pure blinkered nonsense of the same kind that caused Matt Brunson to wax eloquent to this genial effect:

Admittedly, some of the allusions skewer more toward the Nazi regime than the Republican Party (though many will persuasively argue that they're one and the same), but how to deny the topicality evidenced in the scenes involving detainment centers where prisoners are hooded, humiliated and tortured, or the presence of a TV station that's unabashedly pro-government, or an administration that instills a vague fear of foreigners to quiet the teeming masses, or a ruler who uses faith-based initiatives to crush opposing viewpoints? Meanwhile, those charitable toward Colin Powell might even see him in the character of Inspector Finch, a decent man too cowed by his bosses to outwardly question their motives. I suppose the only real question is whether a hatemongering right-wing TV host (Roger Allam) is meant to represent Bill O'Reilly, Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh, though ultimately I guess it doesn't really matter.

Perhaps the cut Matt Brunson saw featured prisoners being forced to listen to Christina Aguilera but ultimately this must have been removed from the final theatrical version... In any case, if you're watching this movie for political motivation, "P for Platitudes" is only slightly less topical than "A for Asinine". It's the remainder of the film that's great.

Hugo Weaving is given the unenviable task of playing the title character from behind a Guy Fawkes mask that bears the same silly grin in every frame. As a result, the poor man is left with about the same visual emotive capacity as a mime has vocal range. Weaving rises to this considerable challenge in two ways. First, he gives the character a gentle, eloquent, voice that manages to be very expressive and very English. I only began to suspect it was Weaving at all more than halfway through because he cannot hide his very pronounced and somewhat unusual diction. When he assumed the guise of William Rookwood a few minutes later, it was unmistakable: in the Rookwood voice, one expects him at any minute to scream out "MR ANDERSON!" and start punching through walls.

Second, he brings all manner of small gesticulations into play -- bobs of the head, waves of the hand, posture when standing, that begin to define the character. It's likely that any non-facial gestures would be more noticeable in contrast with the static visage but it seems like these characteristics are calculated, cohesive, and consistent. More importantly, they work.

Regardless of all the criticism attending the filmmakers for putting their protagonist in a mask for the entire running time, there's a interesting point here: in a cinematic language that relies extensively on reaction shots as part of "acting", this film relies on reaction shots of a main character who's incapable of reacting! Some reviewers' comments on the Weaving performance are borderline imbecilic, though. Victoria Alexander writing in "Eclipse Magazine":

...it's a struggle to make out Weaving's muffled ramblings from behind the expressionless mask.

Maybe it's wishful thinking to expect that someone writing published reviews would have heard of a looping studio before; anyway, I'm willing to bet that (barring some miraculous improvements in microphone and Guy Fawkes mask technology) not a word of Weaving's "muffled" ramblings that made it onto the movie's soundtrack was actually recorded on the set. A slightly easier job for film editor Martin Walsh.

Some of the Weaving scenes are actually very poignant, perhaps none more so than that opposite the Irish actress Sinéad Cusack after V has just administered a fatal dose to her scientist/coroner character Delia Surridge. "Is it painful?", she asks. "No," the reply. "Thank you. Is it meaningless to apologize?". "Never." "I'm so sorry," she says, and with that she dies.

Extensive effort is expended beating the "V" symbol within an inch of its life, especially in the visual realm where V even leaves V-shaped bloodstains on walls as he staggers from a victory. In a picture that tried to be "real", these little flourishes would jar us out of our suspension of disbelief; thankfully Vendetta tries nothing of the sort and the symbolism is an enjoyable little gimmick. Even the most brazen -- and pointless -- symbols are a great deal of fun. To wit: the enormous V-shaped domino set that collapses leaving only one standing -- the one thing V does not control, the one outcome he cannot guarantee. A nifty effect, I'm left wondering whether it was deemed workable to set up, light, and photograph those shots traditionally or whether they were subcontracted out to the VFX people and their computers.

Visual effects are generally very good but, refreshingly, are not the main characters of the film. Starkly differentiating itself from modern "action" flicks, Vendetta's effects are mostly more sparingly used. Probably the neatest ones were simple enough, but vintage Wachowski: in a throwback to the film's comic book origins, motion arcs are composited on the tips of V's vorpal blades as they go snicker-snack through Vendetta's final action sequence.

The plot by and large holds together once one accepts that Vendetta is fantasy first and foremost. Personally, I was able to believe that V comes and goes as he pleases, that he apparently does everything from fencing to track-laying, and that he's insanely rich. Would it take millions or billions to create and mail out enough cloak-and-mask sets to create his little army of doppelgangers? It's a little tougher to accept how he manages to get hundreds of thousands of said costumes into the mail but in the end it matters little. How someone whose parents suffered the fate that Portman's did wound up working as a propagandist and mouthpiece at the state broadcaster is also unclear; surely there were other jobs available.

The only place the film truly falls flat is the second act. From the filmmakers' point of view this middle segment provides them with moral ambiguity for the character of V, a surprising plot twist to set up conflict between V and Evey and develop the Evey character, and a soapbox from which to deliver a sermon on their own view of the world. Problem is, the ambiguity is startling but does not stick, the plot twist is unconvincing and unrealistic, and the proselytizing drags on so long that it's hard to imagine even the most faithful follower enjoying it. The film falters but, entering the home stretch, again delivers what was promised from the start. Although Portman's final monologue makes no sense at all (especially through the lens I used to view the film), the finale made me think back to the opening speech and this little gem: "You cannot love an idea." Of course that's as false as it is true, but a good piece of advice all the same.

Whatever. The movie isn't an idea or a person. It's a comic book on the silver screen and I loved it enough to go watch it again. That's the end of that.

*: What do you get when you put "Stalin" and "Hitler" together? Why, you get "Sutler", of course! Maybe the "u" is from B"u"sh. Haha!