[movie] "V for Vendetta" (2006)
I finally got around to seeing "V for Vendetta" (2006).
This is a hard film to review for me, because I am so attached to the graphic novel.
To get the key issue out of the way: Yes, they handled the chapter "Valerie" respectfully and very accurately. There were changes made, some of which I wish they hadn't made. But long passages were accurate enough for me to recite along with the text from memory. Cause, um, yeah, I am that sort of fanatic.
So there's two ways of seeing this work, each of which itself can be seen in two ways. The movie can be evaluated both as a film in its own right and as an adaptation of the book. The book has both its narrative (how it goes about telling what it tells) and its point (why its telling us this), so both of the ways of looking at the film can been examined against those two aspects.
As a film, looking at it on the level of its narrative, it's a reasonably good adventure/thriller flick with aspirations of political commentary. I guess. It's hard for me to pay attention to that level with the book in my head. I feel that, precisely as with LOTR, choices were made to make minor changes to character interactions, no doubt in the pursuit of a more watchable film, which diminished the characters both morally and in terms of their charisma. I really fundamentally think Jackson and McTeigue/the Wachowskis made mistakes in that regard.
In the case of V, he's not supposed to go through character development, he's the anti-hero, and the "force of nature" against which all the other characters' characters' developments are shown in relief. The heros are Evey and Finch, and their character developments are (or should be) deeply awesome in scope. I mean, in a big way, this book is about (moral) character in the face of overwhelming evil and corruption: the emotional climax of the plot concerns a discussion of integrity which happened in a concentration camp (handwaving through the spoilers). The Wachowskis' choice to "humanize" V by giving him character development was both unnecessary and, I feel, counterproductive. V is already both one of the most humane and one of the most intensely charismatic characters I have ever encountered, and Weaving was nailing it.
Part of the difficulty for the filmmakers was that it being a mere 2hr flick, they quite reasonably had to cut large amounts of side story. No objections there, as much as I like those stories and the critical role they serve in the original plot. But if V is the (unchanging) anti-hero against which the changes in the other characters is shown, chopping out most of those other characters makes that entire anti-hero dynamic not really work. Or at least it's a lot more work to make it work. All things considered, I think they mostly got there, but not completely. Hard to say from my vantage.
There was also the problem, if you eliminate the side stories, how to make the whole thing end, since in the book everything comes together (hence the symbol of the falling dominos). And how that hole in the plot is filled brings us to the other layers of this film.
The book is an intensely political work, and it's political position is anarchism. This is completely sanitized from the movie; I can see why Alan Moore would want nothing to do with this film and considered it a betrayal. The movie advances many fine positions, such as "mass murder is bad" and "repressive totalitarian regimes are bad", which I can get behind. But it does not make many of the other political points of the book, which make it considerably less radical.
One of the places it really shows is in the climactic fight scene... which never happens in the book. I trust it's not a big spoiler to reveal that in the movie, the climax involves the person the Wachowskis/McTeigue have mistaken for the hero, V, fighting it out with the key uber-bad-guys. In the book, V is never in the same room with either of them. In the movie, V solves all the problems, does all the dirty work, and saves the day.
In the book, well, suffice it to say that it illustrates the adage about never underestimating the power of one truly dedicated ordinary citizen to change the world.
Those are two profoundly different moral stances. The movie's is that of wish fullfilment, of fantasizing some superhero will save us from the governments we elect. The book's is about the power of the people. That final scene in the movie really misses that point, even as it tries to make it.
There are other ways in which the movie turns aside from its radical predicessor. The biggest is that the movie is about uncovering a government conspiracy. There is no government conspiracy in the book. That plot doesn't exist.
No, the book is about a post-Final Solution England, where Nazi-style concentration camps all over the place were used to exterminate all non-Nordic peoples in England. There's no secret. Everyone knows exactly what happened to all the "foreigners".
So there's another major moral difference: the film is concerned with a corrupt government which used trickery and sneakiness to gain power over a lamentably oblivious but essentially innocent population. (No doubt for obvious reasons.) The book, however, is concerned with a society with blood on its hands, a society which made a pact with the devil: the population knowingly went along with -- and actively embraced -- openly committed atrocity. This shows up in the changes to V's broadcast; in the movie, he rallies the people to object to their government with stirring platitudes, where in the book, he takes them to task.
There's another very large and pervasive moral/political difference: a major theme and plot-driver of the book is the low-level -- "grass-roots", if you will -- corruption on the street under such a totalitarian regime: thugs getting deputized to work for the secret police, and then using their power to commit crimes; smuggling as a way of life under rationing; the degradation of everyday people as they try to get through each day under untenable sitations. This is the "Vicious Cabaret" of which one of the chapter titles alludes. There is no Vicious Cabaret in the film -- and I'm not just talking about the actual caberet in the book, but the whole of the issue and story around corruption.
One tiny place where this absence is particularly noticeable, and suggests to me it might have been a political decision, not a movie-fitness decision, is in the choice to elide the precise circumstances of the off-screen death of a minor character. In the book, we learn, in just a sentence, that that character commited suicide after being tortured by the secret police for three days into confessing that her spouse was a criminal. There's a point the book is making about how living in such a society debases those who live in it, even to the point they can't live with themselves. All of that is absent from the movie.
Also, the death of another character then has to be provided in some other way to advance the plot and the character development of the main character(s). Of course, the filmmakers attribute it to the handy totalitarian government, in the film; in the book, he's killed by crooks, another pointed illustration of what has become of the whole of that society.
No doubt there are other things I am missing, but is some of the big stuff. While the movie and the book are political kin, the movie tells a far more morally/politically conventional tale. What makes the book so powerful and discomfiting is that it actually has new, interesting things to say about totalitarianism -- things which the movie doesn't say.
It's quite remarkable how faithful to the book the movie manages to be, in light of just how different its political agenda and moral stance is. And faithful it is, on the level of the story, not the point: lovingly rendered right from the text. Some key changes were made for aesthetics/relevance, but large parts are the comic brought to life, right down to the choreography of individual panels. (To the point that it actually irked me that they filmed the scene at Dr. S's bed from the right side instead of from the left! Not that that makes no nevermind.)
That fidelity is comforting in its familiarity and respect for the source material, and it is a pleasure to see these things on the big screen. I have no idea if they have the impact on people unfamiliar with the book that they have on me: I was reacting, I'm sure, as much to what I remember as what I was seeing.
So my judgment on this film is complex. It's not a bad flick; I enjoyed it. In some ways it's magnificently faithful to the original work... just not in some of the most important ways. I don't disagree with it's politics, but I can't help but wish it had managed to present the politics of the book, instead. I'm not sure I agree with the politics of the book, but I admire the argument enormously and it made something which might even be great literature. This movie doesn't manage to capture what made the book great, but it does something that's nice. And I mean that with all the ambiguity I can.
This is a hard film to review for me, because I am so attached to the graphic novel.
To get the key issue out of the way: Yes, they handled the chapter "Valerie" respectfully and very accurately. There were changes made, some of which I wish they hadn't made. But long passages were accurate enough for me to recite along with the text from memory. Cause, um, yeah, I am that sort of fanatic.
So there's two ways of seeing this work, each of which itself can be seen in two ways. The movie can be evaluated both as a film in its own right and as an adaptation of the book. The book has both its narrative (how it goes about telling what it tells) and its point (why its telling us this), so both of the ways of looking at the film can been examined against those two aspects.
As a film, looking at it on the level of its narrative, it's a reasonably good adventure/thriller flick with aspirations of political commentary. I guess. It's hard for me to pay attention to that level with the book in my head. I feel that, precisely as with LOTR, choices were made to make minor changes to character interactions, no doubt in the pursuit of a more watchable film, which diminished the characters both morally and in terms of their charisma. I really fundamentally think Jackson and McTeigue/the Wachowskis made mistakes in that regard.
In the case of V, he's not supposed to go through character development, he's the anti-hero, and the "force of nature" against which all the other characters' characters' developments are shown in relief. The heros are Evey and Finch, and their character developments are (or should be) deeply awesome in scope. I mean, in a big way, this book is about (moral) character in the face of overwhelming evil and corruption: the emotional climax of the plot concerns a discussion of integrity which happened in a concentration camp (handwaving through the spoilers). The Wachowskis' choice to "humanize" V by giving him character development was both unnecessary and, I feel, counterproductive. V is already both one of the most humane and one of the most intensely charismatic characters I have ever encountered, and Weaving was nailing it.
Part of the difficulty for the filmmakers was that it being a mere 2hr flick, they quite reasonably had to cut large amounts of side story. No objections there, as much as I like those stories and the critical role they serve in the original plot. But if V is the (unchanging) anti-hero against which the changes in the other characters is shown, chopping out most of those other characters makes that entire anti-hero dynamic not really work. Or at least it's a lot more work to make it work. All things considered, I think they mostly got there, but not completely. Hard to say from my vantage.
There was also the problem, if you eliminate the side stories, how to make the whole thing end, since in the book everything comes together (hence the symbol of the falling dominos). And how that hole in the plot is filled brings us to the other layers of this film.
The book is an intensely political work, and it's political position is anarchism. This is completely sanitized from the movie; I can see why Alan Moore would want nothing to do with this film and considered it a betrayal. The movie advances many fine positions, such as "mass murder is bad" and "repressive totalitarian regimes are bad", which I can get behind. But it does not make many of the other political points of the book, which make it considerably less radical.
One of the places it really shows is in the climactic fight scene... which never happens in the book. I trust it's not a big spoiler to reveal that in the movie, the climax involves the person the Wachowskis/McTeigue have mistaken for the hero, V, fighting it out with the key uber-bad-guys. In the book, V is never in the same room with either of them. In the movie, V solves all the problems, does all the dirty work, and saves the day.
In the book, well, suffice it to say that it illustrates the adage about never underestimating the power of one truly dedicated ordinary citizen to change the world.
Those are two profoundly different moral stances. The movie's is that of wish fullfilment, of fantasizing some superhero will save us from the governments we elect. The book's is about the power of the people. That final scene in the movie really misses that point, even as it tries to make it.
There are other ways in which the movie turns aside from its radical predicessor. The biggest is that the movie is about uncovering a government conspiracy. There is no government conspiracy in the book. That plot doesn't exist.
No, the book is about a post-Final Solution England, where Nazi-style concentration camps all over the place were used to exterminate all non-Nordic peoples in England. There's no secret. Everyone knows exactly what happened to all the "foreigners".
So there's another major moral difference: the film is concerned with a corrupt government which used trickery and sneakiness to gain power over a lamentably oblivious but essentially innocent population. (No doubt for obvious reasons.) The book, however, is concerned with a society with blood on its hands, a society which made a pact with the devil: the population knowingly went along with -- and actively embraced -- openly committed atrocity. This shows up in the changes to V's broadcast; in the movie, he rallies the people to object to their government with stirring platitudes, where in the book, he takes them to task.
There's another very large and pervasive moral/political difference: a major theme and plot-driver of the book is the low-level -- "grass-roots", if you will -- corruption on the street under such a totalitarian regime: thugs getting deputized to work for the secret police, and then using their power to commit crimes; smuggling as a way of life under rationing; the degradation of everyday people as they try to get through each day under untenable sitations. This is the "Vicious Cabaret" of which one of the chapter titles alludes. There is no Vicious Cabaret in the film -- and I'm not just talking about the actual caberet in the book, but the whole of the issue and story around corruption.
One tiny place where this absence is particularly noticeable, and suggests to me it might have been a political decision, not a movie-fitness decision, is in the choice to elide the precise circumstances of the off-screen death of a minor character. In the book, we learn, in just a sentence, that that character commited suicide after being tortured by the secret police for three days into confessing that her spouse was a criminal. There's a point the book is making about how living in such a society debases those who live in it, even to the point they can't live with themselves. All of that is absent from the movie.
Also, the death of another character then has to be provided in some other way to advance the plot and the character development of the main character(s). Of course, the filmmakers attribute it to the handy totalitarian government, in the film; in the book, he's killed by crooks, another pointed illustration of what has become of the whole of that society.
No doubt there are other things I am missing, but is some of the big stuff. While the movie and the book are political kin, the movie tells a far more morally/politically conventional tale. What makes the book so powerful and discomfiting is that it actually has new, interesting things to say about totalitarianism -- things which the movie doesn't say.
It's quite remarkable how faithful to the book the movie manages to be, in light of just how different its political agenda and moral stance is. And faithful it is, on the level of the story, not the point: lovingly rendered right from the text. Some key changes were made for aesthetics/relevance, but large parts are the comic brought to life, right down to the choreography of individual panels. (To the point that it actually irked me that they filmed the scene at Dr. S's bed from the right side instead of from the left! Not that that makes no nevermind.)
That fidelity is comforting in its familiarity and respect for the source material, and it is a pleasure to see these things on the big screen. I have no idea if they have the impact on people unfamiliar with the book that they have on me: I was reacting, I'm sure, as much to what I remember as what I was seeing.
So my judgment on this film is complex. It's not a bad flick; I enjoyed it. In some ways it's magnificently faithful to the original work... just not in some of the most important ways. I don't disagree with it's politics, but I can't help but wish it had managed to present the politics of the book, instead. I'm not sure I agree with the politics of the book, but I admire the argument enormously and it made something which might even be great literature. This movie doesn't manage to capture what made the book great, but it does something that's nice. And I mean that with all the ambiguity I can.