Mark Reviews Movies: VICE (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2018

It is, of course, important to remember that the state of the United States government had been pretty terrible, even before our current situation. Vice, a biography of former Vice President Dick Cheney, serves as such a reminder, even as it attempts to turn Cheney into an almost tragic figure, whose achievements—as questionable as they might have been—matched his ambition, until they ruined his legacy. It's a tough sell, and writer/director Adam McKay is too enamored with stylistic flourishes and too uncertain about how to judge Cheney to make a convincing pitch.

McKay is first and foremost a humorist, and it's difficult to tell if he simply misses the mark in finding the humor surrounding his subject or if there simply isn't much that's funny about the life and reign of one of the most powerful Vice Presidents in the country's history. Some of this is admittedly funny, but the most effective gags lack a certain specificity.

Take, for example, the moment when McKay appears to conclude Cheney's story early. After the 1992 election, when government power shifted from Republicans to Democrats, Cheney, losing his job as Secretary of Defense, arrives at what appears to be a "happy" ending. McKay fills the screen with text of an alternate future, where the man and his family go on to have fulfilling lives as private citizens. Some end credits even start to roll, but a phone rings several years in the future with the offer for a job that would change the way history does and will look at Cheney.

It's quite funny, although only as a throwaway gag. The central idea behind the joke, though, suggests that Cheney, who spent those intervening years as the CEO of a multinational oil company (a company, by the way, that Cheney's Pentagon enlisted and paid during the first war in Iraq—a fact that, strangely, McKay ignores), had no political ambitions once Republican control of the executive branch ended for eight years. In this movie, Cheney's rise to influence in the 2000s is simply a matter of chance and fate.

It seems like an odd perspective, especially since the movie also portrays Cheney, played with uncanny accuracy by Christian Bale (thanks, in part, to some exceptional makeup but, mostly, to the actor's grasp of the man's intonation, physicality, and facial quirks), as a political gamesman, capable of seeing and planning for the future of his career and his ideology. To suggest that this man, whom the movie implies was able to see the rise of so many conservative and right-leaning institutions of an age to come, was simply driven by the winds of fate to his highest office seems like an easy, ineffective way to turn him into a victim of that fate.

As for Cheney's ideology, it is also strangely developed in McKay's narrative. He begins as a good-for-nothing young man working power lines in Wyoming. He's pushed to become something more by his high-school sweetheart Lynne (Amy Adams), who refuses to marry Dick unless he promises to get his life in order. That leads him to Washington, D.C., where he admires the straight-talking ways of then-Representative Donald Rumsfeld (a surprisingly convincing Steve Carell). When deciding for which party he wants to become an intern, Dick chooses the Republican side, simply because Rumsfeld belongs to it.

Presidents come and go in the following years, as Cheney and Rumsfeld plot and scheme to find a way to bring the so-called "unitary executive theory," in which the President has near-total power over the government, into action. Most of this early section of the narrative is essentially foreshadowing for the moment that George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell), perhaps the most unlikely of the former President's children to seek the highest office in the land, calls Dick to become his running mate—an offer he repeatedly refuses, only to accept it for reasons that even McKay can't seem to comprehend. To joke about Dick's apparently indecipherable motivation, McKay gives him and Lynne a scene of Shakespearean scheming, complete with the dialogue.

This inability to figure out why the man would choose to take on this role is either the result of overthinking on McKay's part or the perhaps wrongheaded decision to give Cheney more credit than he deserves. The movie repeatedly tells and shows us that Dick is a man consumed with the idea of power, and then it's repeatedly stymied by the facts of its own history, in which the character proceeds with a one-track mind toward gaining as much power as he possibly can.

There's no real character behind the movie's portrait of Cheney, which simultaneously attempts to condemn him (the backroom political conspiracies), humanize him (how he ignores the politics of his party to embrace his daughter Mary, played by Alison Pill, who comes out as a lesbian), and see him as a man who both took advantage of and was caught up in the political climate of his times. Vice is a hollow, indecisive, and unconvincing biography, so emerged in jokes and structural gimmickry that it doesn't figure out how to judge its subject.

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