Masked and Anonymous

That recent political dramas (and new DVD releases) Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck didn’t really ruffle any feathers isn’t, in retrospect, much of a surprise. Although both were fine films, they preached largely to the blue-state-dwelling, Daily Show–watching converted rather than the megaplex-frequenting masses. Moreover, what they preached was hardly revelatory — oil companies, it turns out, are greedy, and Joe McCarthy wasn’t such a great guy either.

V for Vendetta, on the other hand, should prove to be the real controversy-provoking, Bill O’Reilly–baiting deal. This is in part because it features the incendiary message that bad governments should be removed by, well, incendiaries, and in part because the movie seeks to preach that message to people who like seeing baddies beaten up, stuff blown up and Natalie Portman merely showing up. In short, just about everyone.

Penned and co-produced by Matrix creators the Wachowski brothers, V for Vendetta is an adaptation of the cult graphic novel by comics legend Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Watchmen). Set in a near-future London, the story hinges around V (played by Hugo Weaving), a masked, knife-wielding terrorist who sets about destabilizing the British government by transforming assorted beloved architectural landmarks into rubble. Along the way he enlists the help of a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), whom he later tortures. The twist? V is the good guy, a bona fide superhero whose actions are justified, Moore makes clear, as long as they result in the removal of an even more brutal regime.

True, it is possible that someone, somewhere will enjoy the result without considering the wider issues involved. The movie is not short on spectacular action, with the climactic knives-versus-guns showdown between V and chief government goon Tim Pigott-Smith every bit as exciting, and wittier, than anything in the Matrix trilogy. Hugo Weaving also deserves some sort of award for giving a human face to not just a terrorist but one who literally doesn’t have a face. And any film that features the destruction of large buildings in a Western city is bound to provoke discourse after 9/11, not to mention the London bombings of last year, but the movie also presses a variety of other contemporary hot-button topics such as government-endorsed torture and surveillance. It is also, unlike, say, Syriana, happy to place the blame for the endangered state of the world where it belongs: on us. Indeed, the film’s ultimate message is not that we, the people, should blow up tyrannical regimes but that we should ensure they do not become tyrannical in the first place.

You will look in vain for Alan Moore’s name in the V for Vendetta credits — the writer was so burned by previous big-screen adaptations of his work (Constantine, to name one) that he no longer wishes to be associated with Hollywood in any fashion. Moore is fond of quoting novelist Raymond Chandler, who, when asked what he thought about how Tinseltown had ruined his books, pointed to his tome-laden shelves and declared, “Look, they’re there — they’re fine.” But the truth is that Chandler has been treated well over time by Hollywood. Now the excellent Brick relocates wholesale the seedy femmes fatales and underworld kingpins popularized by writers like Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to a contemporary SoCal high school. And, unlike the TV show Veronica Mars, which sounds similar on paper, this debut from director Rian Johnson is suffused with a decidedly downbeat vibe, helped by a superb central performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the relentless teen gumshoe investigating the disappearance of a former girlfriend. Best of all, perhaps, is the film’s highly stylized, rat-a-tat dialogue, which finds, for example, one femme fatale demanding of our hero, “Do you trust me now?” only to be informed, “Less than when I didn’t trust you before.”

Finally, February saw a two-disc DVD reissue of Alan J. Pakula’s superlative 1976 conspiracy thriller All the President’s Men, boasting Robert Redford’s first-ever commentary. The film itself features both Redford and Dustin Hoffman giving perhaps the greatest performances of their careers as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, real-life journalists uncovering the Watergate scandal. It’s just a shame that the film’s villains — a Republican administration indulging in questionable tactics while fighting an unpopular foreign war — make the whole thing seem so dated and far-fetched.