Vice (2018)

Join me if you will on a trip to a time when Donald Trump was not the most universally hated Republican. I remember watching the vice presidential debate back in 2004 and John Edwards (who hasn't aged well either) said something to Dick Cheney about his not understanding the plight of poorer Americans. Cheney responded by saying that he did know what it was like to be poor and had been a lineman when he was younger. I remember being struck by that, it was the first I had heard of it, this corporate CEO and powerful politician had actually started out running cabals in Wyoming. I thought "now I'd like to hear more about that", this Cheney may be more interesting then he at first appears. Indeed Dick Cheney is kind of fascinating, and a bit of a cipher, what's going on his mind, what is he about, what is the meaning of Dick Cheney?

The new movie Vice explorers these question but I'm not sure it comes up with any definitive answers. It charts Cheney's rise from rural near-do-well, and on up the ladders of power in Washington and the corporate world, eventually reaching his summit as the all but universally acknowledged most powerful American vice president ever. Cheney changed his early rowdy ways out of love for his childhood sweetheart and later wife Lynne (Amy Adams) who wouldn't have him if he didn't try to make something of himself. Cheney went to college earning both a BA and an MA in political science, and then entered an internship in program in Washington.

Now in the film Cheney goes right to work for Illinois congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), when in fact he first worked for Wisconsin congressman William Steiger, and didn't go to work for Rumsfeld until he was working as the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity at the Nixon White House. This error is representative of the types of errors I was able to find in the film, not really substantive, but more about the constraints of keeping a film story slimed down, efficient, and eliminating supporting characters superfluous to the central narrative. Another example of error in this film is George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) being portrayed as drunk at a White House Christmas party which by implication would have been in 1986, George W. Bush got saved and sober earlier that year so the point of his appearing intoxicated in this scene was to establish that the future president had been a screw up.

The film proceeds pretty quickly through Cheney's earlier career wanting to spend as much time as it can in his vice presidency, so we hit the 2000 election at around 40 minutes in. The Cheney who was vice president is a different fella then he had been as recently as his service as Secretary of Defense for president George H.W. Bush, this 'change' in personality has been commented upon by people who knew him then, such as the elder Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and Colin Powell, who by the way is played here by Tyler Perry. Cheney was secretive in his last governmental role, power hungry, and contradictory of positions he had held earlier, such as invading Iraq being a bad idea. Cheney is very single minded here, driven, and obsessed with the theory of the "unitary executive". This all seems true but it's also hard to see what exactly drove Dick from point A to D on this thing, I don't doubt the change happened but I don't understand exactly how or why, other then that is was gradual.

An element of Cheney's story that is nuanced, and fascinating as counterpoint to his ruthlessness in the political realm is his home life. We have sequences of Cheney playing hard ball in office counterpointed with a seemingly very happy and functional family life. When Cheney's youngest daughter Mary (Alison Pill) came out as a homosexual in the 1980's her conservative republican family, her father was a congressman at the time, did not disown her, they embraced her and continued to do so, despite its political liability (though with one big exception towards the end of the film). This is impressive, and would be unexpected if you didn't already know about it. It makes Cheney harder to pin down.

The film is directed by Adam McKay, who mostly does Will Ferrell comedies (Ferrell is an executive producer on this movie) but three years ago did The Big Short, a movie about the housing bubble collapse in 2007-2008. That film and this film are interestingly structured blends of comedy, drama and documentary, which employ unusual narrative devices and digressions to explain, in simplified form, important and complicated concepts (collateralized debt obligation, unitary executive theory) relevant to understanding the stories they are telling. The Big Short does this chiefly through celebrity cameos such as Selena Gomez and (the late) Anthony Bourdain, while Vice does it through a narrator named Kurt (Jesse Plemons) who claims to be related to Dick Cheney but we don't find out how until late in the movie. I think the whole conceit of this film mostly works, though I understand how people can be critical of it, and had I been making/ editing this film I would probably have deleted Cheney's last monologue near the end, I'm not sure it was really needed, it seemed to be spelling out stuff that we should have been able to pick up on by reading between the lines.

Lastly I need to say a word or two about Christian Bale's performance as Dick Cheney. First off they really make Bale look like Cheney, and not in an SNL kind of way, he really looks like Dick Cheney, its impressive make up that doesn't stand out as being make up, I don't know how they did it so well. Bale gets Cheney's monotone grumble down, and while the vice president is both protagonist and antagonist here, I think he comes across as a man who thinks he's right, not just a sneering villain, though of course he is also part sneering villain. When I came out of this movie I felt unsettled, I didn't know quite what to think of Dick Cheney, though I was certainly thinking about him.  I think that is the point of a movie like this, a morally ambiguous character should make us grapple with his ambiguity. Cheney loyalists (I assume there are some) will think this a hit piece, and it is a hit piece, though not a groundless one, and not one lacking in any subtlety. I'm still not sure quite what to make of this movie either, but it is well done and leaves you thinking, so I'm giving it ***1/2