V for Vendetta

Directed by James McTeigue (2005) ***

Author Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd’s serialized V For Vendetta tale was initially published in the UK anthology Warrior in 1982 (though the story had been building in Moore’s mind since 1975). The story’s last two chapters, unpublished in the UK when Warrior was canceled, were eventually published by DC comics in 1988 and ’89, and collected as a graphic novel in 1990. It was another 15 years before the Wachowskis (now Lilly and Lana Wachowski) released their film version, and yet another 14 years since the time the film was released and the time I saw it (this week). Astonishingly, though, the material doesn’t seem dated or irrelevant; fascism never really goes out of style.

Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith in The Matrix trilogy) plays the romantic anarchist V, fighting against a Nordic supremacist regime that’s taken charge in the UK and created a military state that’s in a constant semi-martial law. If “romantic anarchist” sounds like a contradiction, it is; Moore, who by all appearances disdains the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, has created a building-demolishing “hero” more like Rand’s John Galt and Howard Roark than Moore perhaps intended to (his character of the vigilante Rorschach in Watchman was a sly critique of cartoonist Steve Ditko’s Randian Mr. A and The Question). In any event, Moore’s use of a protagonist who’s a deliberate contradiction is both intentional and one of the ideas that gives the story its power.

V (whose face we never see) wears a Guy Fawkes mask in commemoration of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when Fawkes was arrested and hanged after he was discovered with explosives that had been placed beneath the House of Lords. V also intends to destroy the Houses of Parliament, as well as exact revenge on those who destroyed his face and body, and the top officials of the Norsefire police state (headed by a wonderfully malicious John Hurt as Adam Sutler, a reversal of his Winston Smith in 1984).

Aiding him, in various degrees of commitment and deliberateness are, slowly and eventually, Evey (Natalie Portman), a nose-to-the-grindstone low level worker just trying to remain unnoticed, Eric Finch (Stephen Rea), a Scotland Yard inspector tasked with tracking down V, and Gordon Deitrich (Stephen Fry) a closet (outlawed) gay and art collector whose satirical TV show earns the anger of Sutler.

V For Vendetta is what might be termed a hopeful dystopia and the movie’s set designers did a convincing job creating what a future London may look and feel like. The movie goes such a long way to creating and enveloping us in this world, it’s disheartening to watch director McTeigue (assistant director on the Matrix trilogy) and the Wachowskis revel in V’s violence, with the kind of careful loving attention brought to knives rotating into fellow’s necks that a master landscape painter brings to creating cumulus clouds.

Still, the film’s a potent stew, a mashup of 1984, The Phantom of the Opera, Aldous Huxley, Robin Hood, The Shadow, Thomas Pynchon and Judge Dredd. Years after the film’s release, the patented Guy Fawkes mask has been co-opted by the hacktivist group Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street and many other fringe groups. It’s been declared illegal in Dubai and inspired Egyptian youth during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Alan Moore wanted nothing to do with the film because of previous botched film adaptations of his comics (the worst, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen — was yet to come), disagreements over the adaptation of the graphic novel, and other points of contention with Warner Bros. His name appears nowhere in the credits of the film.

Warner Bros.’ two-DVD Special Edition includes two making-of featurettes, a history of Guy Fawkes, and the 15-minute documentary “England Prevails: V for Vendetta and the New Wave in Comics.”

—Michael R. Neno, 2019 May 18