Vice

Synopsis: The story of how Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) became Vice-President and pushed the West into a global confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism.

The title of Adam McKay’s account of Dick Cheney’s transformation from brawling Wyoming linesman to Vice-President creates more problems than it fixes. Whilst it cleverly plays on Cheney’s White House job title to distract from the man’s cloth-eared dullness, the implied promise of tantalizing revelations of corruption and even depravity is never delivered on. McKay's Cheney is an unremarkable, not altogther bad individual who ended up with much more power than he (or anyone) should have. The most we get are some broad polemics warning of the strong anti-democratic tendency in modern American politics.  In essence Vice is a cherry-picking journey through America’s post-Nixon political history as the ideological pendulum swings from, roughly speaking, Left to Right, Democrat to Republican, Ford to Carter, Carter to Reagan, Bush Snr, to Clinton then to Bush Jr and finally Obama.

McKay throws everything he’s got to make Cheney’s story engaging, from fake “happy ending” credits two-thirds of the way through, to a segue into Shakespearean oratory, to a very funny scene in a restaurant in which a waiter (Alfred Molina) offers Cheney’s gang of three a menu made up of various politically reprehensible selections but the film doesn’t have the zest of his 2015 financial crisis drama, The Big Short.

Partly this is because of the decision to encompass Cheney’s fifty or so years in and out of politics from his internship to Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) in the late ‘60s to the end of the Bush Administration in 2005. Even leaving out his years in the private sector while the Democrats were in power, this is still a lot of territory to cover and results in a diligent but dry ticking off of each step along the political way.  Partly this is because Cheney is very much the Confucian career bureaucrat driven to high office by the prodding of his ambitious, strong-will wife (Amy Adams) rather than a force of dramatic interest in himself. It is only in the film’s latter stages when Cheney spearheads the politically astute but morally bankrupt decision to invade Iraq that a Machiavellian side of the man, now an old war-horse, emerges. Partly, too, Vice covers a period of American political history which has been extensively covered already in both feature films and documentaries, meaning that much of the material is familiar.

But then there’s Christian Bale’s remarkable performance as Cheney. It is not in the league of Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour (2017) but Cheney is no Churchill but In terms of physical transformation it is a marvel of close study as well as prosthetics and make-up. Fans of the actor’s work should not miss the film. Amy Adams, as ever, is first class as Cheney’s wife although she could have done with some more exposure. Sam Rockwell is very good at playing a jackass and his George W act is amusing in this respect but he fails to capture the former President’s very distinctive speaking voice. Steve Carrell, evidently still trying to garner respect as a serious dramatic actor, also fails to manage much of a resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld in a film which otherwise is impressive for looking and sounding right.

Clearly a lot of effort has gone into making Vice historically authentic but less information and more drama would have given it appeal beyond the liberal-voting demographic chafing under the current Trump Administration which is its apparent principal target audience.  

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