V FOR VENDETTA AND TSOTSI
As a rule, film critics fondly place themselves at a slight remove from the passive mass of cinema audiences. The fortunate among us have pens with lights on them and, while you let the medium of film simply wash over you, we are making notes on such aesthetic minutiae as the Aryan Band-Aid on the big black head of Marsellus Wallace, or the Damoclean slice of light that falls over Harry Lime in a gloomy alleyway.
Cinema-the most pleasurable of mediums-is made to jump through the same hoops of theme, argument and “imagery” as its more resistant cousin, the novel; necessarily so-otherwise there would be little to critique. No one is asked to review roller coasters. And yet the truth is some films affect you so viscerally and with such fluidity that a pen with a light on it is no match for them. I barely made a note during V for Vendetta, unless “Wow!” and “Awesome!” and “This is so fucking cool!” count as notes.
In the face of this film something adolescent in me surged to the surface, and I mean that as a great compliment: adolescence is a state I hold in high regard. After the fact, I saw what other critics have seen-portentousness, absurdity, misogyny, political naïveté-but the truth is during the film I was utterly engaged, somewhat radicalized and very excited. To me, the film, like the original graphic novel from which it comes, is about personal integrity and, more important, about how that notion might be parlayed into our political lives.
It pursues this idea violently, without humor, and with a bald Natalie Portman onboard. It’s easy to ridicule. Personal integrity is always ridiculed by adults and worshipped by adolescents, because principles are the only thing adolescents, unlike adults, really own. I first read V for Vendetta, by the writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, when I was an adolescent myself, back when pieces of its dialogue, rendered faithfully in this film, were of great personal importance to me: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we ever have-it is the last inch of us. The only inch that matters!”
It is clear that Moore, who has removed his name from the credits, feels his own integrity has been damaged by the streamlining Andy and Larry Wachowski (of the Matrix trilogy) have made to his crowded narrative. The brothers have ditched the supporting cast that tends to proliferate in graphic novels and moved Moore’s English dystopia from its original post-Thatcher, postnuclear era to a world not long after Blair and Bush. Eighty thousand Londoners have died in an act of germ warfare for which terrorists have been blamed. The state has turned from “nanny” to monolithic; the media show a Goebbelsian respect for the truth and a zeal for censorship; homosexuals, “ethnics” and dissidents are mysteriously “vanished”; the people are in the long sleep of fear and lethargy.
Into this bleak world comes V, a man in a white clown mask who takes as his model a long-forgotten English terrorist: Guy Fawkes. The original novel’s respect for Fawkes is one of its sillier aspects-Fawkes was no truth-loving anarchist destroying in order to create, but a Catholic with a grudge against the Protestant majority. And Che Guevara was no prince among men either, but then, adolescents aren’t sticklers for history.
What they are, however, is impassioned. They believe, like V, that “everything is connected,” that “a revolution without dancing isn’t worth having” and that “truth, freedom and justice are more than mere words-they are perspectives.” They find it quite reasonable that V should alight upon tiny, porcelain beauty Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), lock her up, torture her and allow her to believe she will be executed if she doesn’t give the state a piece of information-all in order to set her (existentially speaking) free.
Without spoiling anything, I think I can tell you that during her incarceration, Evey is sent pieces of a story, pushed through a hole in the prison wall, and this story gives her the strength to resist her torture, to find an integrity she didn’t know she had, and radicalizes her in a manner that you either believe or you don’t. The story she reads is a gift (the person who wrote it is about to die and can expect nothing in exchange) and therefore also an act of love. Acts of love, because they are unattached to the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The complaint that a girl is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the gift is everything.
And that’s not even factoring in the pleasure of the massive explosions, Buffyesque fight scenes, a sharp cast of British talent (John Hurt, Sinéad Cusack, Stephen Rea) and the pleasantly subversive fact that the adolescent son of our present prime minister, Euan Blair, was a runner for a film that takes great pleasure in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. The letdown-and I am sad to say it-is Portman herself, who continues to suffer under the weight of a beauty so great it makes Audrey Hepburn look dowdy. Even her bald-headed mug shot looks like a Vogue shoot. Compounding the problem is the kind of English accent only ever found in Swiss finishing schools and the offices of dialect coaches in Hollywood-and Long Island lingers in it still. There is a film for this beautiful girl out there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.
In the meantime, she throws a wrench in the works of V for Vendetta by being both too feminine and too mild for a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not “Blow up the Houses of Parliament” or “Wear a white mask and knife people,” for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of V for Vendetta is “Change is possible.” In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first Matrix movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that’ll be, like, totally awesome.
The premise of Tsotsi is terrific. A young thug from a South African township shoots a middle-class black woman in the stomach and drives off in her car. A mile down the road he hears a baby crying in the backseat. The audience gasps in that odd mixture of surprise and recognition that great storytelling affords. Everything flows from this point with the inevitability and moral didacticism of the Moses story. But the setting is fascinating; everything is news: the township shacks, the glamorous black middle class, the tube station, the concrete rings in which orphaned children sleep out in the open air. At the center is Tsotsi himself (Presley Chweneyagae), who needs no mask to commit his acts of terror-his face is a mask. In a scene so menacing it outpaces the deadliest moments of Scarface itself, he stalks a crippled man through a train station, a beast on the hunt. Frantic local hip-hop, kwaito, choreographs his frenetic impulse to violence; gospel swells as we glimpse the possibility of redemption in a boy who seemed lost to all pity. I wept throughout the last fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, unlike the woeful 50 Cent movie, this film-from which young black men could genuinely profit-will be seen by Ekow Eshun and nobody else. It will not sell for five quid on the Kilburn High Road, and no one will pass it around a playground.