Review of Vice (2018) by Bertaut1 — 05 Feb 2019

Pretty enjoyable, very funny, but doesn't tell us anything new.

Ostensibly a biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale), Adam McKay's Vice argues that he was actually the de facto President, with George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) taking a back seat, particularly in the globally crucial years from 2001-2003. Much as was the case with BlacKkKlansman (2018), Vice has one eye on the here and now, using Cheney's story as a vehicle to examine the current political climate in the US. However, although there are individual moments of brilliance, the film doesn't actually have a huge amount to say.

Beginning in Wyoming in 1963 as a young Cheney is arrested for drunk driving for the second time, the film then cuts to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as Cheney orders the shooting down of any suspicious commercial airliners, despite Bush not signing off on such an order. How he got from the first point to the second is the film's main focus.

Presented as devoid of ideology, with a Zelig-esque ability to alter his mannerisms, McKay's Cheney has no interest in attaining power so as to influence policy or stimulate ideological change, he is obsessed only with power-for-power's sake. One scene sees him ask Donald Rusmfeld (Steve Carrell), "what do we believe?", only to be met with laughter. He's also portrayed as a mercenary; a chilling scene sees him give his daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) permission to condemn gay marriage, despite his other daughter, Mary (Alison Pill), being married to a woman.

As with The Big Short (2015), Vice is aesthetically audacious, cut by Hank Corwin in a similar manner to the "horizontal editing" Oliver Stone pioneered in his 90s films. For example, as Chaney attempts to manipulate Bush into agreeing to give him more power, there are intercepts of fly-fishing. In another scene, when he first learns of the Unitary Executive Theory, there is a shot of a lion bringing down a gazelle.

Also similar to The Big Short is the film's irreverent tone. A particularly sardonic scene comes about an hour in, as the film shows Cheney turning down Bush when he asks him to be his running mate in 2000. At this point, the legend explains that Cheney had chosen family over politics, and that he happily lived out his days in Wyoming. As the Cheneys gather around a family barbeque, triumphant music swells, and the closing credits start to roll, only for the movie to interrupt itself, pointing out that that's not what happened. It's a very meta technique, and one which mocks feel-good biopics. Another very funny scene sees Cheney and his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) speaking in iambic pentameter after the narrator points out, "we can't just snap into a Shakespearean soliloquy that dramatises every feeling and emotion." In another scene, a waiter reads from a menu that features various forms of Cheney-endorsed torture. A hilarious mid-credit scene sees a focus group descend into chaos when a conservative calls a liberal a "libtard", prompting a mass brawl, whilst two young girls ignore it so as to speculate about the new Fast & the Furious film. For all that, however, Vice isn't a patch on The Big Short, for a number of reasons. For example, whereas in The Big Short, the self-reflexive Tristram Shandy-style narrative structure worked to the film's advantage, providing a way into the complex story, here it has the exact opposite effect, oftentimes distracting from McKay's thematic concerns. The most egregious problem is that the film fails to give any kind of psychological verisimilitude to Cheney, depicting his various deeds without offering much in terms of motivations. Is he simply an opportunist? Is he an evil megalomaniac fuelled by a deeper purpose, and if so, what purpose, and how? Could it all really have been about power? The film's Cheney is ultimately unknowable, and that makes his acts more excusable.

Cheney pressured the CIA to find non-existent links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein so as to justify an illegal invasion of Iraq. He oversaw the public relations campaign to build popular support for the war. He encouraged the torture of terror suspects all the while denying it was torture. He was responsible for the worst strategic blunder in US history, the growth of a domestic surveillance state, the dictatorialisation of the office of the President, and the deaths of 4,000 American troops and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Positing him as a man who was power-mad and little else, Vice remains always on the outside, never managing to open the door and expose his actual inner workings. The comedy and structural experimentation make it entertaining, but it tells us very little about Cheney that we didn't already know. Strip away the artifice, and you'll find it doesn't have a huge amount to say, and rather than exposing Cheney's dark soul, the film argues that he doesn't have one. And that is a far less interesting thesis.