Not that it
is wise to suppose that Dick Cheney cares, but I bet he never
suspected at the time when he was at the height of his power, that
the little known writer currently working at Saturday Night Live
producing Bear City skits would go on to make the definitive biopic
of him. That is the problem with being an under-the-radar bearaucrat
with little to no personality. Nobody talks about you, until one
person does and that person becomes the only storyteller around.
The writer
and director of Vice is Adam
McKay, better known for his work directing Will Ferrel comedies such
as Anchorman, Talldega Nights,
and Step-Brothers.
Will Ferrell is still doing that type of shtick. For the time being,
Adam McKay seems to have moved on to more serious entertainment. His
first venture into this genre, The Big Short,
was one of the best movies of the year. Vice is
in the same vein. It takes a complicated subject, the life and
politics of hugely influential if not particularly
known man, Richard Cheney, and tries its best to explain the
significance of his policies and politics. The Big Short
had an easier time at it. That
movie's subject matter was complicated to, but the movie (and the
book as well) adroitly got all the major points across by inserting
them into the stories of several sympathetic well-rounded characters.
Vice lacks a
sympathetic well-rounded character. We learn alot about Dick Cheney
but not so much about what makes him click. We learn much about what
he did but not much about why he thought it was the right thing to
do. Perhaps it would be hard for a writer-director such as Adam McKay
to really understand someone so politically opposite. I have seen it
done before though. I thought Oliver Stone did a particularly good
job with Richard Nixon in Nixon.
I mean, the movie makes a big deal about Dick Cheney's pursuit of
power, but what is power without purpose. Did
he actually want anything besides it? I'm not sure this movie found
the answer to that question.
The
most chilling thing about Cheney is that there might be less to him
than you would think. I watched Errol Morris' documentary interview
of Donald Rumsfeld and was absolutely taken aback by the utter lack
of seriousness and self-introspection in Donald Rumsfeld. Donald
Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney go back a long way, Cheney basically
learning the ropes of Washington from Rumsfeld. Was Dick Cheney like
Donald Rumsfeld? Can he really be explained by a scene in the
beginning of Vice in
which a hungover and bruised Cheney is read the riot act by his wife
and told that if he does not make something of himself she will leave
him. To gain power to keep his wife, is that the sum total of this
man's ambitions. What a scary thought.
Adam
McKay does not seem to agree. I
think McKay's politics are provoking him to seek some more nefarious
answer to that question. So the movie makes much more sense in its
first half when Cheney is an
underdog more defined by a
simple pursuit of power than in the second half when Cheney gains
power and pursues many of his
controversial policies like war and torture. McKay hasn't achieved
insight into Cheney motivations, but he is assuming that something
more is there. Maybe, maybe not.
The
performance in Vice
are damn near perfect. Christian Bale may seem a not obvious choice
to play Dick Cheney until you see him onscreen for five seconds and
you realize its the perfect casting choice. As
a matter of course, he seems to have gained like fifty pounds to do
this role. All in a days work for this man.
This is a much better version of Dick Cheney than we briefly saw
Richard Dreyfuss give in W.The
most perfect choice of casting though belongs to Steve Carell as
Donald Rumsfeld. That is some uncanny shit. I
remember being unnerved while watching the real Donald Rumsfeld in
The Unknown Known. I
felt the same thing here and think it a stroke of genius to use Steve
Carell, an actor who has played famously empty characters before like
Brick the Weatherman, to portray Rummy.
Like
any half-way decent movie that portrays well-known people, the viewer
gets a kick out of who got cast to play whom. Tyler Perry plays Colin
Powell. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush. Amy Adams plays Lynne
Cheney. George W. Bush, bless his big dumb heart, doesn't seem to
know what he is doing half the time and is under the unfortunate
impression that Rumsfeld and Cheney do.
I
like political movies with a point of view. Not only does Adam McKay
have a point of view, he is brilliantly angry about it. This movie
and The Big Short
reminded me of the best movies of Oliver Stone. They take chances,
they are vibrant, and they are passionate about the subject matter.
Sometimes this really works like when Dick
and Lynne Cheney speak Shakespeare. Other times not so. Vice
has a narrator who is not really
introduced and might not be a portrait of the actual person he is
supposed to be. (Noticeably, he narrates this story in a wearied
manner, not unlike the narrator in last years War Machine.
Is this how Afghanistan and Iraq are to be remembered? As sad slogs.)
We do not know who this man is until he gets run over by a car and
Dick Cheney as organ donee, receives his heart. The movie argues that
Dick Cheney slighted the dead man by referring to his donor heart as
"his new heart." I get what the movie is getting at, but
heart problems don't seem to be a
fair thing for
which to criticize someone.
I
found Vice to be
frequently funny. That does not mean the movie has jokes. This
relates more to the skill of the writer/director who consistently
finds ways to present information in a clever and efficient manner. I
am a big fan of Adam McKay. I look forward to whatever he does next.
