very simple

After much, much running around this weekend with pre-vacation shopping (no, seriously, I went to the Old Navy on 34th street three separate times in two days!), I took a break, and went back down to 34th street to catch V for Vendetta. It’s the first movie I’ve seen in a theater since Syriana, which I saw with my dad in early December, long enough ago that it was on my end-of-2005 movies I saw list. It’s now mid-March. That’s either a sign of how busy I’ve been or how sucky the post-Oscar rush of movies has been, and I’m voting for the latter. I actually went looking for a movie to see a week ago, and there was nothing playing that I wanted to see.

(SPOILER ALERT!!)

So anyway, the movie. It was…interesting. I never read the Alan Moore graphic novel, so I really have no comparison to make, but I have to say that it was quite chilling. Hugo Weaving was simply amazing. Particularly since you never see his face, or any emotion of any kind, as the mask is completely solid. You really got a sense of V, and it was all through his voice.

I always like Natalie Portman, but I found her English accent to go in and out a bit (enough so that it was actually distracting). But she should be bald all the time. She’s unbelievable looking.

As for the plot – It’s interesting in the way that this was written well before the current crises (actually as a reaction to Thatcher-ite England), yet seems so much more timely for today. David Denby in the New Yorker panned the film, wondering why they couldn’t blow up some random, made-up structure relevant to the movie, rather than such an enduring institution of Democracy like Parliament. I think he completely misses the point. It’s these very institutions of democracy that we have to be ever-vigilant in protecting, because it’s these very institutions that can so quickly and easily becomes symbols of something else in the hands of the “wrong” people. The fact that it’s Parliament is precisely why the act has so much meaning.

And I probably shouldn’t have, but I got totally choked up with the zoom out to show hundreds of thousands of Britons in Guy Fawkes masks. It was a damn cool visual.

I did keep thinking that V was going to turn out to be Evey’s father, just based on the backstory we’re given about him, but I’m happy that they left them as relative strangers. I do kind of wish that his treatment of her had radicalized her, but that she didn’t forgive him. I think she let him off the hook too easily on that one. And Stephen Rea was great – perfectly ambivalent, trying to do his job, but knowing the difference between what was the law and what was right.

Anyway, I certainly recommend it. And yes, this may just be my hyper-liberal point-of-view endorsing the film, but the underlying story could just as easily evoke communism as it does fascism (as much as either one of those is a complete distortion of reasonable leftism or rightism). Absolute power corrupting absolutely is not limited to either side of the political aisle.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve reached the point of nostalgia for that crazy european deal that I worked on, since we actually pulled an all-nighter at the printer in London on Guy Fawkes Day, witnessing the fireworks from our conference room windows…

Tags: movies