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March 14, 2006
'V For Vendetta': Revolution Lite Premieres in New York
Right off the bat, I should tell you that no, the Wachowski Brothers did not come to last night's V For Vendetta premiere at the Time Warner Center's Rose Theater. The transgender-recluse-disguise speculation swept the red carpet with photo-flash velocity before giving way to the more benign concern that star Natalie Portman would be shepherded into the theater before the men covering the event could slip her their phone numbers.
Natalie Portman, winding down the press-gantlet part of the evening at Monday's V For Vendetta premiere (Photos: STV)
The corresponding spectacle--bright lights, big mask (see below)--represented exactly the type of trouble Vendetta faces as the year's most anticipated film to date. Portman fans, readers of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's source graphic novel and not just a few twitchy government types have been on the lookout for this movie since the actress shaved her head, Moore swore the project off and Warner Bros. pushed back its release date more than four months in the wake of last year's subway bombings in London. Meanwhile, critics and cognoscenti awaited a Matrix-esque Big-Idea Movie that would signify the Wachowskis' return to form. Vendetta should be a film that had everything, the world gasped, and that it kept us waiting only underscored its disinterest in compromise.
Yet as far as Big-Idea Movies go, Vendetta has all the incendiary juice of a Che Guevara T-shirt. It fetishizes revolution to the point where it persuades viewers to let it do the work for them--an ironic phenomenon at best considering the very possible--nay, very real--circumstances behind its delayed release. And the $50 million budget does not even buy producers Joel Silver and the Wachowskis or director James McTeigue (left) an especially powerful surrogate. We get the sound and fury of totalitarianism, we get its dehumanizing force, we get its vulnerability, but we do not get the sense that this endangered world is really our own. In other words, as Hugo Weaving's masked freedom fighter V defiantly tells one of his victims late in the film, "Ideas are bulletproof." Perhaps, but movies are not.
Which is not to say that Vendetta is a bad movie. It IS slow and discursive, in love with the sound of its own voice. But it is also redeemed through striking traces of Moore and Lloyd's original dark vision; the bursts of violence that befall the naif Evey (Portman) and her English countrymen transcend Wachowski style, hinting more directly at First-World Apocalypse. From the start, we are to equate police with rapists, television with fascist propaganda and futuristic London with a city under siege. V and Evey's unlikely partnership ostensibly emerges from their having saved one another from government attackers, but whether or not Evey's complicity owes more to V's protracted brainwashing exercises than to any political awakening (her own backstory, it turns out, is fraught with crisis) is left open to interpretation.
As such, neither character is motivated by the moral sense that contemporary culture associates with brand-name martyrs like Guevara or Malcolm X (or even Guy Fawkes, the would-be Parliament bomber from whose 400-year-old legend V draws his mission and his mask). This is V For Vendetta, after all--it is all personal. Nevertheless, it would not be Holywood without at least some pandering to altruism, which is where Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea) comes in. Torn between his duty to bring V down and his knowledge of the government conspiracy responsible for V's grudge, Finch is supposed to represent a pervading ambiguity between right and wrong--he is Vendetta's central conflict.
But despite one of Rea's typically earthbound performances, McTeigue and the Wachowskis so overemphasize the "right" that Finch becomes almost all agenda and no tension. "Cops are logical people," Rea told The Reeler at Monday's premiere. "They like to see a pattern. They like to see it going a certain way, you know? They're best at getting subversive activity. It's supposed to lead him in a certain direction, but this leads him toward government. And he's freaked out. But he is a proper cop, and he says, 'Well, I have to believe what I see.' He doesn't cover up when he realizes there's something bigger going on. So he's a bigger person than just the Average Joe."
Sure, but Finch also symbolizes the potential for the Average Joe to come around--not only that, but also to take action. The film's high point, in fact, has nothing to do with its explosions or patently stupid domino tricks, but rather intercuts a revelatory Finch monologue with a swift-moving montage of civic uprising. It is as explicitly dark and sincere a statement as Vendetta makes, but it arrives too early in the final act to sustain its raw nerviness.
"What the movie is saying is that the governement is responsible for a lot of lawlessness and that isn't good enough," he said. "We hired them, and we'd like them to do their jobs a little more responsibly, please. We don't like to be lied to about weapons of mass destruction or anything else. We don't want to be lied to."
Nor do we want to be preached to, which is where V For Vendetta trips most violently. This is the film that overthrows a government so you do not have to; it informs you that you are not alone, even though you are. It is revolt as romantic fantasy and politics in black and white. V's control of Evey may provide the story's most perverse nuance, even as McTeigue mishandles it as a sort of banal, unrequited love. Portman's conversion from victim to true believer is about as grotesquely severe as Weaving's black wig, although the latter actor deserves commendation for fleshing out V's three-dimensional identity from behind his Fawkes mask.
"I think essentially, the essence of any character is not really what they look like, although of course that's important," said Weaving, who is currently starring opposite Cate Blanchett in BAM's presentation of Hedda Gabler. "But it's how they feel or what they say or how they think. And that's true with any character. Someone you talk to on the phone, you can still inderstand what they're saying and how they're saying it. You can't see their face, but you can imagine it. I figured with V, it was pretty much the same. The same approach to anything you would approach V in that way as well. Having said that, there was obviously a need to humanize the mask, and to bring the mask to life."
Easily fascinated, I asked how he went about doing that. "I think just keying in really to what he was saying was the thing that helped that. I kind of started to use the mask, it to puncuate things he was saying. There's a fluidity to the mask in some scenes which is important. But after the first couple of days, I didn't think technically or consciously about the movement of the mask. Except I tried to avoid lots of little shaking movements because they just looked appalling."
OK, then. Weaving moved on, and a murmur swelled to a roar several yards away. Mark Ruffalo, Gina Gershon, Petra Nemkova Joel Silver and Robert Downey Jr. had already come and gone. That left one person, one last red carpet icon.
Do not let the broad, beautiful smile fool you: Red-carpet refugee Natalie Portman flees in terror
You got it: David Carr. The Carpetbagger himself. He stood 20 feet behind the the photo well, observing a Natalie Portman frenzy with his twin daughters. "Am I going to like this?" he asked. I told him I did not know, that I thought it was just OK, definitely a second-act movie. He sighed. "How long is it?"
A few reporters shrieked from the carpet. "Miss Portman, what about your hair?" "Natalie!"
Ugh. Where is a Wachowski when you need one?
Posted by stvanairsdale at March 14, 2006 11:43 AM
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