New Release! Vice (2018)

Director: Adam McKay

A reasonably entertaining look at certain key aspects of Dick Cheney - arguably the most powerful and influential vice-president the United States has ever had in office. However, it is a look very often colored by writer and director Adam McKay's strong political biases.

Not unlike his smash hit 2016 film The Big Short, Vice adopts a coy, humorous style and tone to dig into some very real historical events. In this case, the nature of Dick Cheney, a man who seemed never to have been "the smartest guy in the room" or much of a politician, but was perhaps one of the most low-key and successful opportunists the White House will ever see. By tracing his roots from a hard-drinking, Yale dropout hanging power lines in Wyoming to and through his time as a congressional intern, Chief of Staff, and ultimately Vice President, we get a portrait of a man guided by little more than a rough set of conservative ideas, a hyper-keen nose for opportunity and power, and propelled by an ability to seem far less threatening than he actually was.

While Cheney is clearly a rather interesting modern historical figure, whose fingerprints are still all over the U.S. political landscape, the more obvious set of fingerprints on this movie are Adam McKay's. My wife even compared it to a Michael Moore film, in that Vice has a style that overwhelms and most likely obliterates much of its substance. The narrative is non-linear. There are several self-indulgent (though funny) flights of humorous fancy, and more than a few wink-wink, nudge-nudge moments directed right at those of us in the audience. Honestly, it felt far too flippant, given the gravity of much of the subject matter. This only grows more obvious as the story arrives at the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. When a filmmaker is essentially laying hundreds of thousands of civilians' dead bodies at a man's doorstep, it seems atonal to be taking little comic jabs at his speaking style and endless series of heart attacks.

The seemingly non-threatening Dick Cheney. Christian Bale
turns in another transformation and excellent performance,
even if cinematic forces beyond his control weaken the film.

Savvy viewers will probably be able to suss out the fact from the fiction, but it's not always easy. In addition, the implications that McKay makes about Cheney are, to be honest, unfair at times. Sometimes painfully unfair. Yes, Cheney had a big enough hand in pushing the Iraq War in 2003 that he deserves a big portion of the blame. One could even argue that he should probably have gone to jail for war crimes. But to suggest that every dead body from that war was solely Cheney's fault is a gross oversimplification. There were no end of hawks and enablers surrounding that debacle, from the president right on down to the tens of millions of Americans who fully supported to war, even as it became more and more obvious that it had been predicated on a massive lie. While I understand that such issues are too complex and uninteresting for an "entertainment" like McKay's movie, I can only think that he should honor the subject's complexity or leave it the hell alone.

Ultimately, I probably agree with McKay's general feelings about Cheney and many of his cohort through the 1980s and 2000s. But I also think that historical events, especially recent ones, need to be handled with respect. What Vice gave us elicits more than a few laughs, but they are laughs that fade once the credits roll and one realizes just what the consequences were of the subject's actions. It is all a subject which deserves a more thorough, sober look through the form of a quality documentary, rather than a streamlined, comic version that leaves out far too many of the other relevant facts and people involved.