Vice review: This crude portrait fails to shed light on a heartless Veep

Matthew Norman25 January 2019

If Vice is to be believed, Dick Cheney has shaped this century like nobody else. It establishes that the Iraq War was conceived and executed by a man whose monumental influence on planetary affairs is matched by his obscurity.

But is it to be believed? “This is a true story,” reads the first of three opening captions. “Or as true as possible, given the secrecy,” qualifies the second. “But we did our f****** best,” shrugs the third.

By the end of the film, written and directed by Adam McKay, with Christian Bale as the mercilessly dead-eyed former vice-president, that last line reads like a disclaimer — “if you leave knowing Cheney no better than when you arrived, you’ll know how we feel.”

If such a talented auteur-leading actor combo couldn’t shine a light on Cheney’s heart, perhaps that’s because he has none to illuminate. In literal terms, Cheney has had two. In a gruesome shot, the camera dwells on his first, resting on a surgical table while the second is being transplanted. Metaphorically, he emerges from this uncanny impersonation as the second abundantly heartless American psycho played by Bale.

Told with McKay’s trademark narrative gimmicks, the story begins in mid-Sixties Wyoming. Cheney is a feckless college dropout until his bright, Lady Macbeth-ish wife Lynne (Amy Adams) gives him an ultimatum.

Pulling strings: Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice

Up he shapes, wangling an internship with Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) in Nixon’s White House as his first step to becoming an even trickier Dick. For almost an hour, Cheney is the focus for an amusing if overlong lesson in modern US history, from Watergate to the cusp of the 2000 election.

After Nixon, he rises without trace to become Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. At home he seems a nice enough guy and a decent father to two daughters. At work, initially he seems lost. “What do we believe in?” he asks Rumsfeld. “That’s very good, what do we believe in?” reiterates Rummy, cackling so deliriously at this known unknown that you fear for his bladder control.

All Cheney believes in is power. Not the power to improve lives but pure power, held purely for the joy of exercising it. He’s a jowlier, growlier O’Brien, the chilling inner-party sophist in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If that makes the portrait sound crude, it is, for all Bale’s excellence. Shorn of any motivation beyond giving Lynne vicarious thrills, his avarice lacks a psychological source. But how practically to acquire ultimate power when he is too appalling a public speaker (the audience can’t tell his first heart attack from his typically halting delivery) to win it via the ballot box?

He leaves politics to run Halliburton, the oil giant that profited so splendidly from Iraq, when opportunity comes a-knocking in the drawling, faux good-’ol’-boy shape of another reformed drunken wastrel. When George W Bush (Sam Rockwell) asks Cheney to be his running mate, Cheney agrees if Bush promises him “some of the mundane jobs. Managing the military, energy, foreign policy…”

Reunited with Bale and Carell, McKay directs with the same creative disdain for convention that helped make 2015’s The Big Short a masterwork. But the tweaks on convention that worked wondrously there (having Margot Robbie demystify the sub-prime mortgage market from her bath) grate here. This tale is too easily understood to need such flourishes as a narrator (Jesse Plemons) cropping up in many guises before his relevance is revealed.

And if anything, McKay goes too far in masking his fury about how Cheney cunningly sidestepped the constitutional safeguards against an almighty imperial presidency to legalise the Iraq war, and then used propaganda techniques to shift public opinion in its favour.

His cutest touch is running the final credits on the night of the 2000 election, with Florida called for the Democrats. In this alternate time line, Al Gore won, Cheney went home to indulge his love of fishing (a metaphorical device throughout, though God alone knows for what), and we all live happily ever after.

As the film resumes to point out, it didn’t pan out that way. McKay earlier shows Cheney and Antonin Scalia as young friends. Now Scalia returns as the decisive Supreme Court vote that hands Bush Jr the presidency by halting the recount.

Perhaps it was what someone once called a vast Right-wing conspiracy, and perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple. Either way, a central function of biopics is supposedly to deepen our understanding of the subject. Like Bohemian Rhapsody, though not from the same desire to sanitise, Vice never comes close.

Bale bulked up by several stone to play Cheney and inhabits him well with sinister stillness. But when a movie’s premise is that its subject single-handedly moulded recent history, you want more depth and grandeur than this one provides.

A scene that shows Cheney being sweet to one daughter when she comes out, and later telling the other to oppose gay marriage when running for Congress, is as close to nuance and paradox as it gets. They did their f****** best — but it wasn’t quite enough.

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