Vice (2018)
Directed by Adam McKay
Written by Adam McKay
Starring Christian Bale, Amy Adam, Steve Carell, Allison Pill, Jesse Plemons, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry
Release Date December 25th, 2018
Published December 22nd, 2018
Vice is an attempt at a satire of the former Vice President Dick Cheney. Unfortunately, though Dick Cheney is a large enough target for satire, Vice doesn’t have the teeth to make the satire work. Limp jabs at his time running the White House and the straightforward presentation of Cheney’s life, from his time as an alcoholic lineman in Wyoming through his time in the White House and his final heart transplant, the satire is so weak that it never lands a single blow on the former VP.
Christian Bale stars in Vice as Dick Cheney and the transformation is remarkable. Bale, one of the more handsome men in Hollywood, turns seamlessly into Dick Cheney. Putting on weight and undergoing four hours a day of makeup, Bale enhances the look with his voice and manner which brings Cheney to life on screen better than you could imagine. In fact, Bale is so good that he’s part of the reason that the satire of Vice doesn’t land.
Vice proceeds to tell the life of Dick Cheney in a manner that mixes up the timeframes of Cheney’s life. We start with Vice President Cheney on September 11th, after he had been rushed to an underground bunker and took over calling the shots on how the United States responded to the terror attack. The scene reflects rumors of how VP Cheney was usurping Presidential powers and the machinations are vaguely treated as menacing but the movie goes on to, unintentionally, sell the idea that Cheney, being more experienced and prepared for this moment than was President Bush, was right to takeover from Bush in this moment.
Then we flash back to how Dick Cheney got his start. In the early 1960’s Dick Cheney appeared headed nowhere. Cheney was working as a lineman in Wyoming. We see Cheney working for unscrupulous phone company engineers who care little for the employees who have little to no training or safety equipment. Cheney worked and then spent hours in bars getting drunk and getting into fights and getting arrested.
It isn’t until his wife Lynn (Amy Adams) has to bail him out after a DUI that Cheney’s life is finally turned around. Lynn demands that Dick get cleaned up or she will take their daughter and leave and from there, the film cuts to Washington D.C where Dick is now working as a congressional intern. In the time between when Cheney was a drunken lineman until he began working in Congress, Cheney graduated from college and discovered an appreciation for politics.
Cheney’s start in Washington D.C came when he fell in with then Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell). Cheney was Rumsfeld’s intern and it is unexpected to see the Cheney we know today as a toady for someone even more unscrupulous and crude than himself but these scenes aren’t humorous, they are just sort of there. These scenes lay in important details about Cheney’s history during Watergate, his fast rise in the ranks of the Ford Administration, and his machinations within the Reagan White House, but they are the least interesting parts of Vice.
Vice doesn’t pick up strong momentum until Cheney becomes George W. Bush’s choice to be Vice President in 1999. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush as the flighty fratboy that the left has always believed him to be. It’s not a bad performance but there are more laughs in Rockwell’s manner, his style, the charming way he plays Bush than from anything Bush and Cheney actually do. The scenes between Bale and Rockwell are rarely funny but they aren't dramatic either, they play off of media perceptions of both men without providing much insight.
That said, it was during the Bush Administration when Cheney, the character we know from many books and profiles, begins to emerge. We see his moves on the Iraq war, the way he used the law manipulate the country into a place where torture was legal and the film does begin to satirize the Cheney of lore as a power hungry, no-nonsense, bully. Is it funny? Kind of, in the absurdly straight-forward way that McKay frames the scenes and uses history to reflect these as poor decisions, but it is in conflict with Bale's performance as Cheney who doesn't appear to be in the fact that he's supposed to be the villain. Playing Cheney as having strong convictions is not exactly the satire we are expecting.
It is during the time when Cheney is deciding whether to become Vice President that McKay relies on an odd but surprisingly effective device similar to one that he used in his Academy Award nominated The Big Short. McKay uses fantasy sequences as punchlines to punctuate the life of Dick Cheney. The first is a fake out ending that has Cheney retiring quietly after having been George H.W Bush’s Defense Secretary and leaving politics to become the CEO of Halliburton and leaving politics behind forever.
This scene only evokes a bit of a chuckle and not a big laugh but I did enjoy seeing the credits begin to roll at the start of what was to be the 3rd act of Cheney’s life. This fantasy moment plays like wish fulfillment for those who despised the Bush-Cheney team and the joke is well-timed with the credits rolling far longer than you expect them to before we cut back to Cheney taking a call from George W. Bush and arranging a meeting regarding the Vice Presidency.
McKay goes back to the well of the fantasy sequence once more not long after this. The film employs a mysterious narrator, Jesse Plemons, who makes brief appearances throughout the movie, setting up a surprisingly effective reveal near the end of the movie. The narrator explains that we can’t really know what Lynn and Dick talked about the night that he decided to become the Vice President so the film goes into a remarkable, and quite funny, Shakespearean sequence in which Bale and Adams banter in the words of Shakespearean villains planning to carve up the world in their image.
For a brief moment Vice achieves its satirical potential. Cheney as the over the top Shakespearean Machiavelli figure is the perfect portrayal of the former VP. This moment combines our perception of Cheney with a touch of the reality. It's the Cheney of leftist lore and reality. Cheney is seen in Vice as a nasty politician with the ability to snake his way through the halls of power, taking power where he can and biding his time until he could turn things to his advantage. Shakespeare offers the perfect comic template to combine the aspects of Cheney that have taken hold in the public imagination.
This, however, is only one scene. It’s quite a funny scene and exceptionally well performed but it can’t make up for what is lacking in Vice which is a stronger through line of humor. The film doesn’t push the envelope beyond these fantasy sequences. It’s fine if the filmmakers are intending for us to make up our own mind about Cheney but I was expecting something more forceful, more directly critical. At the very least, I expected the Darth Vader-esque take on Cheney that holds the public imagination but the film, and especially Christian Bale, fails to push hard enough on that villainous side of our perception rendering the intended satire a toothless quality.
Vice is far too dry for my taste. Cheney is a huge satirical target and Vice doesn’t land a glove on him. George W. Bush gets far more of a roasting in Vice than Cheney does. In the bare minimum of scenes Sam Rockwell gives us an SNL worthy roasting of the former President as the slightly dopey daddy’s boy who was President in name only, a persona that many left leaning audiences will enjoy. It’s more savagely critical than anything Bale does with Chaney though both performances are solid. I just don’t know what the filmmakers, specifically director Adam McKay, is attempting to say about Dick Cheney in Vice.
