Vice
(USA, 132 min.)
Written and directed by Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell,
Sam Rockwell, Jesse Plemons, Alison Pill, Tyler Perry, Lisa Gay
Hamilton, Lily Rabe
 |
| Christian Bale stars as Dick Cheney and Amy Adams plays Lynne Cheney in Vice Courtesy eOne Films |
"Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?"
-King Lear
Dick Cheney is a villain worthy of Shakespeare. The Bard deftly blended tragedy and comedy to comment upon the rulers of today and while Adam McKay might not be William Shakespeare, he certainly knows how to craft a bad guy. After skewering Wall Street, the man behind The Big Short takes aim on the White House and sends audiences back to the dark ages of the now- second worst administration in the history of the USA. George “Dubya” Bush is too easy a target though, and has already been picked apart by movies like the incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Bush-league Oliver Stone biopic W. Instead, McKay sets his sights on the junior Bush’s wingman, Vice President Dick Cheney, played in a deadpan performance by Christian Bale in a furiously funny film. Cheney is a man of many vices and McKay’s flick portrays him as a crafty, Machiavellian politician who was really pulling the strings throughout Bush’s reign of terror.
McKay provides a playful bit of revisionist history as he
draws upon the records from Cheney’s past. The opening title cards humorously
note that this tricky Dick was a master redactor and kept a suspiciously scant
paper trail during his time in office. McKay and company have a lot of fun
putting Cheney on trial with a great degree of circumstantial evidence.
The bulk of the film centres on Cheney’s orchestration of
the war in Iraq and the shrewd political manoeuvers the Veep pulled in
fabricating the dots that purported to connect Iraq to the terrorist attacks of
9/11. Vice covers much of the same
terrain as this year’s other look back at the Bush era, Rob Reiner’s
forgettable Shock and Awe, but with a
little more style and a lot more spunk. The film bounces national tragedies
like happy opportunities for Cheney to exploit as he uses his political shrewdness
to interpret the laws liberally and bend the Vice President’s authority. While
Bush’s stupidity makes headlines, Cheney goes in for the attack like a stealthy
shark.
Bale owns Vice with
his immersive inhabitation of the heartless Veep. His Cheney is an par with villains of great tragedies. (An observation McKay himself makes, but we’ll get to
that in a minute.) Bale is often prone to overacting, but his work in Vice surprises with its restraint as he
takes ownership of Cheney’s signature monotone to convey the man’s coldness and
cruelty. It’s a heartlessly mannered and precise performance, perfectly researched
and calculated to capture Cheney’s cunning mind and moral bankruptcy. There is
no warmth to this man. He only smiles in recognition of opportunities.
Adams is the Lady Macbeth to Bale’s sinister
second-in-command, playing against type and showing a side of herself we haven’t
seen outside of The Master. The
natural warmth of Adams’ screen presence is a trait the actress shares with her
subject, and the homely, matronly presentation of Lynne Cheney makes her
ruthless ultra-conservatism sharp and disarming. Adams, like Bale, is very
funny by playing it straight and the darkness of Vice’s sense of humour makes the present reality of the farce
doubly unsettling.
The film boasts of the year’s best ensemble casts with an
A-list roster of talent peppering roles of all sizes and seizing the
opportunity to stick a knife in the Veep like the band of complicit killers in Murder on the Orient Express. Steve
Carell is a highlight in the sprawling chorus of male co-stars and gives an excellent
turn as Donald Rumsfeld. He uses his dry comedic timing for great dramatic
effect. Sam Rockwell provides an uncannily bang-on interpretation of George W.
Bush that nails his adolescent eccentricities while Naomi Watts is a hoot
playing one of the generic “Fox News Blondes” who anchors the news coverage
with dry, impersonal delivery but nicely coiffed locks. Alison Pill is the
heart of the movie as Cheney’s gay daughter Mary, who cruelly becomes a pawn in
the family’s heartless thirst for power, while Jesse Plemons is an intermittent
scene-stealer as the film’s mysterious narrator. The ruse of having Plemons serve
as Vice’s guide is one of the film’s
shrewdest formal moves, especially since McKay withholds information about the
speaker’s identity until the film’s end to bring Vice to an unexpected and ironic conclusion.
While the film lambastes Cheney without concern for subtlety,
fans of The Big Short will relish the
playful assortment of formal devices that McKay uses to skewer the Veep. For
example, one scene sees Cheney admit that he could better express himself
through verse. Bale and Adams transition from contemporary dialogue to
mock-Shakespearean verses as Dick and Lynne consider in conspiratorial
exchanges their fates and those of their rivals. It might be the single most
ingeniously funny scene of the year as Bale gives a performance worthy of
Richard III with Adams making a fair Goneril (note the “Reagan” joke), and Vice conveys that a modern-day plot may
run afoul in Washington as a powerful wingman plots to usurp the POTUS.
Other fun tidbits like a fake “and they lived
happily-ever-after” ending around the 40-minute mark shows how close the world
came to being saved from the Bush/Cheney marriage. Nothing in Vice ever quite captures the magic of
the scene in The Big Short in which
Margot Robbie explains stock market stuff while sipping champagne in a bubble
bath, and the film often strains to offer exactly that kind of out-of-nowhere
bullseye that makes it all click. McKay, to his credit, certainly has a lot fun
trying.
This tautly scripted and sharply acted flick doesn’t hold
back in alleging Cheney’s self-serving evil. However, Vice also lets Bush off the hook while doing so. Vice's Bush is all-stupid, no blame. There's no denying Bush's stupidity, but the film humanizes him in key moments and often lets his buffoonishness serve as a protective bubble of ignorance. (Which may be accurate, but still...) For example, when
McKay dramatizes the moment in which Bush addressed the nation and sent the
country to war, he zooms close on Rockwell’s foot as the President anxious
jitters his heel, uncertain of his actions. The image cuts to a father in
Afghanistan as his heel also jitters while his family await the bombs that will
kill them. The parallelism is offensive and not the rose-coloured lens that
Bush, or anyone in his administration, deserves.
The portrait of Cheney, on the other hand, is so great
because it lets audiences see his inner workings and understand how and why he
became a power-hungry animal. It does so without making audiences sympathize
for Cheney, and Bale’s performance ensures that he isn’t a one-dimensional
monster, either. He’s the best villain of the year. Cheney exists as a rare
form of evil: one we can recognize, but can’t fully grasp. Cheney isn’t the
only villain in the movie—he just might be both the most and least obvious baddie.
Vice opens in
theatres on Christmas Day.