Vice is the new film written and directed by Adam McKay,
whose previous credits include The Big
Short – the 2015 movie that explained, often hilariously, how the 2008 economic
meltdown happened. That picture was extraordinary for a couple of reasons: first,
because it was an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s fascinating but non-comedic book
about the breakdown of the financial system; and second because McKay was able
to make the complicated topic both understandable and funny. There is no question that he has a talent for comedy –
he’s a former writer for Saturday Night
Live and the director and cowriter of Anchorman
(2004), Anchorman 2 (2013).
Vice, about former Vice President Dick Cheney, bills itself as:
”The untold true story that changed the
course of history.” The question is:
can McKay apply his gifts of explication and satire to what is, in essence, a
biography?
Here, as in The Big
Short, McKay is aided by a fine cast – most notably Christian Bale as
Cheney, Amy Adams as his wife, Lynne Cheney, and Steve Carell as Donald
Rumsfeld. Adams and Carell are terrific, and Bale is amazing. This is thanks in
part to a great job by the makeup artists who not only aged him, in steps, by nearly
fifty years during the course of the narrative, and in the process made a guy who’s
normally svelte look paunchy and bloated. Bale helped the cause by gaining
something like forty pounds for the role and was almost unrecognizable. Acting
is far more than physical size or even appearance, of course; and Bale so
completely inhabited his character that by the third act, I felt I was watching
Cheney himself.
I’m writing this the day after the 2019 Golden Globe award winners
were announced. Keep in mind that nominations and prizes by the 88 voting
members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are neither a reliable
barometer of quality - case in point, Bohemian
Rhapsody received their award for best movie drama (!) of the year - nor an
accurate predictor of the Oscars or other movie awards; but it is the first
major awards show of the season. Vice
was nominated for six Golden Globes, including Best Picture, Director, Actor in
a comedy or musical (Bale), Supporting actress (Adams), and Supporting actor
(Sam Rockwell). The only win was for Bale as Cheney, the only category where a
win was deserved – although Viggo Mortensen was equally deserving for his role
in Green Book, and for similar
reasons. Given the competition, it would have been surprising if Adams or
Carell had won, despite their lovely performances. On the other hand, it was surprising
that Sam Rockwell was even nominated for his portrayal of George W. Bush and it
would have been a travesty if he had won. (Mahershala Ali was the winner for Green Book.). Rockwell’s W is simply
weak caricature – funny, but with no meat whatsoever on that bone.
Still, the acting overall is impressive, and the visual similarity
between all of the actors and the characters they are playing is remarkable. In
fact, the overall look of the film is terrific.
As in The Big Short,
there are many bits in Vice which are both incisive and
very funny, capturing various aspects of Cheney’s personality and/or venality
in some choice moments. One such moment comes relatively early, when a callow
young Cheney, then an acolyte of Donald Rumsfeld asks his mentor, “So what do
we believe in?” Rumsfeld’s response is priceless, and pretty much sums up the
dark theme of Vice as a whole. Another telling and fairly hilarious scene is the meeting where
Cheney accepts W’s invitation to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential
campaign.
Compared to The Big Short,
however, Vice is tackling a much bigger and even more complicated story:
the personal life and long public career of a well-known political personality.
On top of that its subject is someone who, notoriously, has always been impenetrably
reticent and secretive. This would be quite a challenge for any filmmaker. Unfortunately,
McKay is not up to the task.
For one thing, his scope is way too broad. Rather than exploring
Cheney’s personality, views, and impact by centering on a key moment in his
life - an approach epitomized by other successful biopics, such as Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), which gave us a nuanced portrait
of our greatest president by focusing on his political and personal struggles in
the weeks leading up to the
Emancipation Proclamation – McKay opts instead for a full retrospective of
Cheney’s life from his days as a Yale dropout to the conclusion of his vice
presidency nearly fifty years later. Somewhat at odds with that goal, he also wants
to focus on the eight years of Cheney’s vice presidency, when he wielded more
power than any VP in history, and on the troubling consequences that resulted: the
Iraq war and subsequent destabilization of the region, sanctioned use of torture
by US military and intelligence services, increased concentration of power in
the White House, enhanced use of “national security’ to eviscerate individual privacy
rights, institutionalized mendacity and obstruction to attack political
enemies, and so forth. If all this seems
like way way too much territory for one feature-length movie, it is.
Then there’s the problem of genre, which McKay never satisfactorily
resolves. Is Vice intended primarily as a biography or as a comedy? A satire
or a polemical exposé a la Michael Moore? It aims to be all
of these, and to be fair, it does score a few points here and there. We learn,
for example, that our Machiavellian vice president had five or six offices
scattered around the power centers in Washington: in the Senate, at the CIA, Pentagon,
State Department, and NSA in addition to his formal offices in the White House
and the Executive office building. And the picture makes it crystal clear, if
we had any doubts, that this uncharismatic, quiet, behind-the-scenes guy was not
just wrong-headed but calculatingly smart, unprincipled and dangerously
powerful.
Ultimately, however, we never quite figure out what we are
supposed to be watching. As a comedy, it’s got relatively few funny moments. As a polemic against the Bush administration’s Middle-East wars and its antiterrorism fanaticism, it’s preaching to the choir and won’t attract or convince anyone else. As a satire, it is trite. As a biopic, it is superficial. There are so many gaps in the story, we learn almost nothing about how the drunk neer-do-well we meet at the outset turns his life around to become the successful, consummate insider we see at the end. It had to be more than the tongue lashing he receives from his girlfriend and eventual wife Lynne in the first act. As Vice
would have it, the only reason Cheney got elected to Congress in 1978, was because
he had his first heart attack and the far smarter and likable Lynne took his place
on the campaign trail for several weeks. Really? Before that, how did he connect with Rumsfeld
and work in increasingly responsible positions in the Nixon/Ford White House for
six years, winding up as Ford’s chief of staff? Or later, why did the first
President Bush select this guy as his Secretary of Defense and give him
oversight over Desert Storm (the first Iraq war)? Why would the giant
multinational Halliburton Company select Cheney as its CEO and keep him there,
paying him millions, for five years until tapped as George W’s running mate in 2000?
Vice
provides no insight and no answers to any of these questions. All we know is
that he’s seemingly a loser at the beginning and somehow a brilliant if dangerous
powerbroker at the end.
2 hours 12 minutes Rated R (for language and some
violent images)
Grade: C+
Currently in wide
release.
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