‘Vendetta’s’ dystopia a critique of present day

In theaters

V FOR VENDETTA, directed by James McTeigue, written by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore, 130 minutes, rated R.

The cautionary thriller “V for Vendetta” finds director James McTeigue envisioning some rather difficult times ahead for the year 2020.

Within 14 years, England will be a totalitarian state ruled by the vicious dictator Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt, bad teeth consuming the screen); the United States will be ruined by the global war it ignited; and on the streets of London will be a mass murderer in a Guy Fawkes mask who goes by the name “V.”

Played with swift, literate ease by Hugo Weaving of the “Matrix” movies, V has a deadly personal vendetta against Sutler and his regime. Like Fawkes, who intended to blow up Parliament (and died by hanging in 1605 when his plot was revealed), V plans to do the job himself to capture the world’s attention with his own point, as destroying famous buildings tends to do.

The film, which the Wachowski brothers adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel, is at its core a pop-culture confection, dipping freely and liberally into a scattershot of influences to compose its whole.

Throughout are clear echoes of “Batman,” “Zorro,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Metropolis” (check each film’s ending), as well as flashes of George Orwell, Shakespeare, Orson Welles and H.G. Wells.

Noir factors into almost every corner of the story and its production, but then so do elements of science fiction and the Western. Adding to the fright factor is that V physically looks and moves as if he’s one step removed from Michael Jackson, though after some minor surgical tweaking that went amusingly awry. In some shots, their resemblance is uncanny. And a little creepy.

But I digress.

Really, this overly wordy movie is about romanticizing a terrorist and turning him into a hero. Since these days that’s about as dicey as playing with chickens in Turkey, it’s probably best to put it into the perspective the movie intends.

The terrorist in question is fighting a fascist government that has done unspeakable things to its citizens – homosexuals and women are scourged, murdered and loathed, creative thought is crushed, art is abolished, freedom is a lost dream. Under Sutler’s dystopian rule, people live in a pacifistic state of fear that prevents them from rising up against him and his henchmen.

Sound familiar? Oh, the present-day echoes abound, reverberating off the screen and railing through the theater. Complicating matters is Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), the fearsome naif who V saves one night from certain rape by government cops, then converts (rather brutally) into his fearless sympathizer.

Much of the story focuses on her religious awakening under V’s guidance, but McTeigue also trains his eye on Finch (Stephen Rea), the chief inspector charged with finding V and shutting him down before it’s too late. Each is excellent in this dense, beautifully shot movie designed to break audiences from their own complacency and get them talking. What they discuss and how they feel about the subject matter are beside the point. Like V, McTeigue and the Wachowskis have composed a stage that allows for the exchange of thought and the value of ideas.

Unlike V – and this is the crucial irony the movie presents, the one fact that demands attention – they use the art of moviemaking to sell their message, not violence and certainly not terrorism.

Grade: B+

On video and DVD

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, 88 minutes, rated R.

Set in 1986, Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale” is about a bickering New York couple married 17 years who decide to divorce. They are writers and they are academics – the worst sort of academics – inflated with ideas that are not their own, but which nevertheless inform their own empty rhetoric.

They may hail from Brooklyn’s Park Slope, but there still is the sense about Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney) that they exist in a subdivision of Stepford, where residents are programmed to drop as many literary references as possible in an effort to elevate the illusion of their own intellect.

These are people who exist in metaphor. Their lives are abstract. As such, their divorce is proving disastrous for their children. Caught in the middle, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline) are forced to watch their peculiar family dissolve, with Bernard and Joan making the pretentious mistake of treating each boy as their equal, and thus fully capable of understanding and accepting the complexities of what’s to come, which isn’t only cruel, but ridiculous.

In this war their parents wrought, the kids hold their own as long as they can. While there’s nothing new in that, what sets the movie apart is its caustic stripping down of the indignant, out-of-touch, false academic, a satisfying approach that generates interest because of the egos on display, and because of the egos deservedly bashed.

Grade: B+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.