Vice

One thing I have learned in the last eight years is that it’s safer to avoid voicing opinions, especially about politics. There are very few people anymore who vote for the better candidate, preferring to simply vote the party line. That kind of thinking has always been a thing and always will be. Director Adam McKay, who came to my notice with the 2015 film The Big Short, has decided to tackle yet another hot topic ripped straight from the headlines. But this time it is heavily veiled in a different political figure, only truly unmasking the real target in a post-credits scene where a hot-headed Republican wearing a red shirt, instead of a red hat, assaults a liberal who is hiding behind “facts”, all while a couple of girls ignore the violence around them and discuss the next Fast and the Furious film. We get a screenshot of Donald Trump earlier in the film and even hear Republican President Ronald Reagan use the phrase that has become infamous in the 21st century: Make America Great Again. The point couldn’t be more obvious.

What we have here is a film that purports to explain how America became the way it currently is. But to get there, we have to put up with a lot of unnecessary filler material. This is the story of the rise of Vice President Dick Cheney, but what we really want to see on-screen is the George W. Bush years where Cheney would elevate himself to be the most powerful Vice President in US history. It takes about a quarter of the film just to get to the start of all of that. 

It is one of the many major stumbling blocks this film has, making audiences wait for so long to get to what we all came here to see. The average moviegoer has no interest in Dick Cheney’s time working as an electrical lineman or his drinking, partying, and brawling days at Yale. Nor do we really care about his time as a small-time politician from Wyoming. The film opens up with a brief scene during the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, teasing us with what we want to see, then leaves us hanging for way too long before getting back to the juicy stuff. 

This is not exactly a complicated topic in the same way as the housing market crash was. There is no need to dumb things down. Yet Adam McKay does just that, utilizing many of the same techniques to explain the point-of-view he is offering up. The most egregious of these is the inclusion of Jesse Plemons as a fictitious narrator who claims in his first scene to be related, in a complicated way, to Chaney. We get no other explanation for that statement until nearly the end of the film. Plemons’ character pops up throughout the film to spell things out in a way that talks down to the audience, and none of it is particularly enlightening. 

In The Big Short, we got cutaways to various celebrities spelling out complex processes and ideas. Here, Plemons speaks mostly for the mindset of Chaney at any given time, while at the same time going on and on about how no one really knows what is actually going on in that mind, or anyone else around Chaney at the time. It’s a pointless gimmick that doesn’t even have a satisfactory revelation when we finally get the reveal of how he and Chaney are related. As this character didn’t exist in real life, it further makes no sense to even include him other than an attempt to reclaim the gimmick that we had in The Big Short. 

Another stumbling block this film has is that it portrays a moment in history many of us were alive to witness. All but the youngest of audience members for this feature would remember the 2000 election and all the hiccups that accompanied it. All you have to say is “dimpled chad,” and anyone over the age of forty will know exactly what you are talking about. Likewise, the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and the rise of government-sanctioned torture in defiance of the Geneva Convention are all still fresh in mind. We all know about how the government approved the tapping of everyone’s phones without a warrant and how we all went along with the loss of freedoms in the name of security. None of this is enlightening, and worse, it’s not particularly entertaining, either. 

Christian Bale is excellent, as usual in this. In 2010, he dropped a lot of weight to portray Dicky Eklund in The Fighter. Just a few years later, he swung the entire opposite direction by gaining a lot of weight and over-exercising his neck to more closely resemble Dick Chaney. Where other actors are more than willing to rely entirely on makeup effects to alter their appearance, Bale has the drive and the discipline to undergo the physical transformation. Say what you want about the film itself, but Christina Bale is as good as he always is in it. 

Amy Adams is an Academy darling, netting six Oscar nominations for her acting over the course of her career to date. Her role as Liz Chaney is the type of part she could perform in her sleep. There is nothing here that requires her to stretch as an actress. While she is a welcome presence and does nothing to distract from the story, she also does nothing to add to it beyond the goodwill of being who she is. She got a nomination for this, but to be honest, it doesn’t feel earned this time. 

The final piece of the puzzle, of course, is Sam Rockwell playing George W. Bush. Sam is an excellent actor who can make even the most bland of characters glisten with life. He may not come across as a true reflection of the real George W. Bush, but what he is doing here is impressive. He is playing the man as the public persona of him actually is, a likable presence who also happens to be a bit of a buffoon. That’s how many Americans view him in the years since he left office, but, like the real man, we distrust him but don’t outright hate him. That stronger reaction is reserved for the man who stood behind him but used that office to greater effect than most in his position. This movie posits that Dick Cheney was the real driving force behind the war in Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein. Whether that is entirely factual is left for interpretation. We are treated to a head count of the civilians who lost their lives in the war, just to help us make up our own minds on what we think of him. 

The structure and tone of The Big Short just doesn’t translate nearly as well to the film Vice. The overall result is a film packed with great performances but has severe pacing issues and comes across as political grandstanding and, at times, paints a broad caricature of the participants. We get details and events, but fall short of character motivation, masking any attempt at that with a line of dialogue from the narrator stating that we don’t know what was going on in the minds of the people we are privy to watch. That feels like a cop-out, an excuse to not even try to personify Chaney as a real person. There is no real insight into the man himself, and what we are presented with is a barely disguised attempt to place all the blame of the current political climate on the head of one man, Dick Chaney. The film is never boring, but it doesn’t merit its Academy Award Best Picture nomination. 

Academy Award Nominations: 

Best Picture: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Adam McKay, and Kevin J. Messick

Best Director: Adam McKay

Best Actor: Christian Bale

Best Supporting Actor: Sam Rockwell

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams

Best Original Screenplay: Adam McKay

Best Film Editing: Hank Corwin

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe, and Patricia Dehaney (won)

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Release Date: December 25, 2018

Running Time: 132 Minutes

Rated R

Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Tyler Perry, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, and Sam Rockwell

Directed By: Adam McKay