Review: Vice

Vice (15)

USA 2018  132 mins  Dir: Adam McKay  Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill

When Christian Bale delighted the Church of Satan while collecting his Golden Globe by hailing Beelzebub himself as the inspiration for his portrayal of Dick Cheney, everybody’s favourite Batman left no one in any doubt about his opinion of the former US Vice President. This is a view that’s endorsed enthusiastically by writer/director Adam McKay. So it’s hardly surprising that US reviews of Vice have divided sharply, generally reflecting the political outlook of critics. If you saw McKay’s previous award-winning political satire The Big Short, which also starred Bale and Steve Carell, you’ll know what to expect from his playful, hyperactive approach to making dry and complex ideas easily digestible by Saturday night popcorn audiences: freeze-frame explanations, on-screen captions, pacy whip-smart montages, fourth wall breaking, and so on. While The Big Short had a cinematic first in the form of Margot Robbie explaining the sub-prime loan scandal while sitting naked in a bubble bath and sipping champagne, Vice goes even further by having characters lapse into Shakespearean soliloquy and introducing a waiter who delivers a political menu. Watch out too for the hilarious false ending halfway through.

There’s a case for saying that Vice lacks the focus of The Big Short, which was adapted from a book rather than being an original screenplay, as it attempts to cram in everything from an Iraq War primer to an exploration of the origins of Fox News and an explanation of the alarming Unitary Executive Theory while charting the mysterious rise to unprecedented power of a “monotone bureaucratic Vice President no one noticed”. Fortunately, Bale’s incredible transformation into the paunchy, balding, gruff Cheney succeeds in holding the attention throughout this thoroughly enjoyable black comedy.

Back in the early sixties, things aren’t looking too promising for the young Dick. A brawling drunk who’s eventually chucked out of Yale, he is, the initially unseen sardonic narrator (whose relationship to Cheney is revealed at the end of the film) informs us, a ne’er do well. “In today’s parlance, they’d call him a dirtbag,” he elaborates. Lynne Cheney (Adams, terrific as usual) is even more forthright, denouncing her hubby as a “big, fat, piss-soaked zero”. The film’s thesis seems to be that it was her ass-kicking that prompted him to land a place on a congressional intern program, whereupon he rose without trace into the higher echelons of government as part of a power couple, with ambitious Lynne railing against the ‘liberal elite’ in Washington. In this, he’s assisted by becoming the protégé of young Nixon aide Donald Rumsfeld (Carell). Cheney’s big break comes when he befriends a shambling drunken buffoon name of George W. Bush (Rockwell), in whom he clearly recognises something of himself.

Occasionally the comedy veers into the knockabout, and a fly-fishing metaphor gets rather laboured, but Vice mostly does a fine job in dissecting Cheney’s “skill at making wild and extreme ideas sound reasonable” and his exploitation of how issues such as environmentalism and women’s rights “make some people angry”, as the narrator puts it. There’s also a judiciously chosen selection of archive news clips (Reagan promising to “make America great again”, our old friend Tony Blair on WMDs, etc) to help drive the narrative along and raise additional smirks.

Bale doesn’t simply let the prosthetics do the work, but delivers an entirely convincing transformation from idiot hick to sycophantic political ingenue (“What do we believe in?” he asks Rumsfeld earnestly at one point) and subsequent soulless, gimlet-eyed, power-accumulating VP. Much fun is had with Cheney’s ailing heart, while his only red line of principle – gay marriage, on account of his daughter Mary (Pill) coming out as a lesbian – is swiftly abandoned when his other (straight, ambitious, chip-off the-old-block) daughter chooses to go into politics.

McKay resists the temptation to draw parallels with the current incumbent of the White House, though Cheney’s enthusiasm for the concentration of power through the Unitary Executive Theory, deriving from the Second Amendment, is certain to send a shudder down many a spine. Its presumption is that anything the president does must, by definition, be legal. “You can do whatever the fuck you want,” he enthuses.