Official Trailer/Annapurna Pictures
Christian Bale stars as a laconic and menacing Dick Cheney in ‘Vice.’
Finally, Hollywood has given birth, perhaps inadvertently, to a genuine angry leftist filmmaker—a dedicated, satiric power-protester spinning tales of systemic malevolence, with plenty of budget support and movie stars at his disposal.
Adam McKay cut his teeth as a busy comedy producer, writer, and director in the frivolous post-SNL mode (Anchorman, that sort of thing), and could’ve trundled along making millions from low-stakes yuck-fests to his dying day. But then the pile-up of the Bush II Administration, the Iraq War, and the financial eclipse of 2007-08 seems to have turned him into a full-on Tinseltown dissident, a Peter Porcupine for the neoliberal Information Age.
His 2015 Oscar-winner The Big Short took bone saw and shovel to the ways in which the financial sector managed—and continues to manage—the state of larcenous inequity that defines the modern economy. His new film, Vice, is another Sherman tank of a political farce, addressing the toxic historical ingredient known as Dick Cheney, from his sorry beginnings as a drunk Yale dropout to, in McKay’s argument, the man responsible for nearly everything that’s evil about American Empire since the Reagan Administration.
The film is both factually accurate and an outrageous Hollywood charade, executed in a rambunctious formal style McKay has made all his own.
The film is both factually accurate and an outrageous Hollywood charade, executed in a rambunctious formal style McKay has made all his own—a freewheeling mashup of winking biopic clichés, stunt-casting flourishes (Christian Bale limns Cheney in impeccable fat-face make-up, as Gary Oldman did Churchill in Darkest Hour), sardonic direct address, side lectures, slide shows, news footage, faux-Oliver Stone-ish backroom fantasies, and goofy Michael Moore-ish editing gambits.
Virtually everything, in short, is grist for McKay, whose high-spirited tone and breathless pacing deliver on an impudent moral rage about the real world that’s rare in mainstream American media. In its machine-gun way, Vice strikes a fine balance, between seriocomic pop history and furious activism.
McKay’s opening title card claims the film is “as true as it can be,” given Cheney’s passion for secrecy. But, the text reads, “we did our fucking best.” Skipping back and forth in time (from Cheney’s beer-soaked dropout-and-DWI days to the bunker on 9/11), the film runs through biopic moments, with surprising results. Cheney went from being a soused nobody to a White House intern in six years, and only seven years after that was appointed chief of staff for President Gerald Ford.
Through it all, McKay lays down a calm but accusatory narration (including a spoiler-alert whammy saved for the last act), temper-tantrum montages, scenes lifted from Richard III, and Funny or Die-esque skits that caricature the power-abusing scenarios Cheney was always cooking up. A wicked bit has Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Addington in a posh restaurant having a menu of euphemistically labeled state crimes offered to them by smug waiter Alfred Molina. “We’ll take ‘em all,” Cheney cheerfully growls.
During the Bush II years, Dick Cheney stood apart in seeming to know that he was evil. McKay would agree, and though Vice takes Cheney as a family man seriously—his devotion to his wife Lynne (a fierce Amy Adams) and daughters is woven in without smirks—the portrait that emerges is of a soulless schemer pursuing executive power for its own sake. Not a minute is wasted on exactly why Cheney is who he is, and given the breadth of the crimes and the number of corpses, I’m good with that.
The movie justifies its bomb-tossing posture, noting how Cheney established offices for himself within the CIA, the Pentagon, and both houses of Congress; how he cultivated the run-up to the Iraq war via market research; how he found the right kind of lawyers to craft torture-memo rules of engagements; and how he twisted and crippled the procedural and regulatory rules ordinarily checking the executive office. Perhaps the film’s master stroke is a single climactic image of Cheney’s old, discarded, post-transplant heart sitting on an operating room table, all by itself. This is only one man, but, the narration proposes early on, a man responsible for “forever changing the forces of history for millions and millions of lives. And he did it like a ghost.”
McKay knows from comedic performance, too, and the film is thick with actor-y zest, especially Steve Carell’s blithely amoral Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell’s gormless Dubya, who feels spot-on without being a slavish impersonation. Bale does impersonate, crooked half-smile and all, but the overall illusion is so holistic and convincing you tend to forget what the actor really looks like beneath the prosthetics.
It’s little wonder that right-wing reviewers and business publications like Forbes have dismissed the film as “useless.” Certainly it is, to them. Vice establishes a boisterous vision for popular political cinema we can only hope McKay continues to pursue. Imagine his big-budget, star-filled farce assaults on Kissinger, on Reagan, on Karl Rove and Roger Ailes and Mitch McConnell . . . and on Trump. Sadly, the last seventy years or so of American political culture tenders no shortage of possible bulls-eyes.