"V" is for very disappointing

So M picks me up from work yesterday, and we drive home. We pull up in the driveway. M puts the car in park, looks over at me and says, "You know, V could have been a whole lot better."

"I've been thinking about that all day," I replied.

There are pros and cons to seeing movies late, well after their theatrical releases. You miss the communal effect that adds a lot to the filmwatching experience, and you miss riding the whole zeitgeist wave of a flick like V is for Vendetta - and it was a pretty big wave. On the other hand, there's something to viewing a film as just a film, apart from the attendant hoopla. None of that worked in favor of V, which M and I finally saw on DVD this week.

Neither of us had read the Alan Moore comic on this the movie was based, which is just fine. Adaptation or no, a film should be judged on what actually makes it onto the screen. We are fans of all of the notable actors in the movie, especially Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, and thought they did fairly well with the material they were given. We don't fault the players for what turned out to be an empty, disappointing film.

So who gets the blame? This falls on the shoulders of the entity that calls itself The Wachowski Brothers (and also director James McTeigue). They managed some interesting visuals and a great deal of hyperbole, but might as well have populated the set with store mannequins. Imagery has its place, but sooner or later you have to use words when you talk to people, and the script for V is just uninspired. Andy and Larry W. delivered flat, lifeless dialogue that gasps for literary CPR and saddles decent actors with a heavy burden. But even that isn't the crime here, bad as it is.

The theme of a society freighted with the crushing gray mantle of totalitarianism is only toyed with in this movie. It's suggested but hardly explored, and seems to be given less thought than the musical score (which I can't remember now, not any of it). This is a Britain in which art has been outlawed, joy has been made a crime, privacy and personal liberty made sneering jokes - except that little of that actually made it to the screen! We see glimpses of people in pubs, families at home, but spend no time with them to get the evidence of everyday lives trodden down by a repressive government. Where's the fear? Where's the frustrated rage? What the hell kind of dystopia is this, anyway?

If you're going to make a movie about changing society, you have to show us the society. In real time, preferably.

We don't spend time on that with V. Instead, we spend a lot of time watching whatever kind of relationship exists between the titular character and Evey - a deliberate choice made by the filmmakers, and a bad one because it's made at the expense at everything else there is to see. In the end, you have a second-rate love story, a population whose collective mind was somehow changed while standing off in the wings somewhere, and an Parliament whose destruction seems at once both melodramatic (that is, unearned drama) and anticlimactic.

I read a critical comment on this movie that paraphrased Gertrude Stein's slam of Oakland: There's no "there" there. Something else came to my mind as V came to an end: Revolution is no business for dilettantes. The makers of V wanted to change the world, but changing the world is dirty work. I guess the Wachowskis preferred playing with marketing to soiling their hands.

(Apologies for rant. I will purge myself by seeing Snakes on a Plane. Cross-posted.)