There may be no way to make a movie about Dick Cheney, mainly because he's probably the most secretive politician in history, but also because to be true, he's impossible to humanize. Adam McKay, the writer and director of Vice, certainly pulls no punches in going after him. There's no ambiguity as to where Mr. McKay lies on the political spectrum, and nothing up in the air about his lingering anger toward the administration Cheney led and the heap that Cheney and his cohort left the country to clean up. The thesis of the movie, essentially, is this:
A completely valid approach, but also not a particularly challenging one. I voted against Cheney both times. I know he's a monster. Convince me he's a human being.
McKay graduated from SNL and goofy comedies like Anchorman to make The Big Short, a fascinating ensemble film which detailed the collapse of the housing market that Cheney partially oversaw. That movie, like Vice, mixed straight-faced social commentary with academic narration and acidic satire, but in taking essentially the format of a heist movie, it put human faces on its protagonists of varying moral sensibility. McKay particularly coaxed unique performances out of Christian Bale, as an eccentric math whiz, and Steve Carell, as a disgruntled stock market player who, the economy be damned, feels he's owed.
Though Bale and Carell turn up again here and give laudable performances, the humanity is missing. I suspect that McKay's collaborator on The Big Short, Charles Randolph, provided the conventional frame that gave its epic story shape, while McKay provided the acidic humor and righteous rage. Here, from a script he wrote by himself, McKay only has the acid.
He tries to apply the same explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-a-six-year-old method of The Big Short, having a working-class father named Kurt (Jesse Plemons) narrate Cheney's story from beginning to... well, near-end. We get a glimpse of Cheney's early years, a couple of his DUIs, his failure at Yale, and his being saved by the sternness of his dedicated wife Lynne (Amy Adams, wasted), who is played as more of a Lady Macbeth figure than I imagine the real Lynne Cheney is. We see his solidifying of power as he works his way from chief of staff to then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Carell, hilarious) to Wyoming Congressman for 10 years, to Secretary of Defense, to Vice President.
The early scenes are a bit of a yawn, since the movie doesn't get to its red meat until the Bush years. It's then that we see the Cheney we know: scheming, gaining influence, consolidating as much power as he can in the Vice President's office, to the point where he's ordering planes to be shot down on September 11th without the President's authority. Since Cheney is all skill and no personality, there's really no point to the setup. There's no spark to his relationship with Lynne other than their collaborative scheming, which I suppose is the point.
The only moment where Mr. Cheney registers as a human being is his defense of his daughter Mary (played well by Allison Pill), who came out of the closet shortly before his run for the White House. It's Dick who defends her--against a casually apathetic George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, grinning and empty) and against the ambitious Lynne--and his defense withers away toward the end, as he throws Mary under the bus to make way for his older daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) to run for Senate as an opponent to marriage equality. This turnaround could have sparked a real human conflict in the Cheneys, but either McKay isn't interested in it, or the Cheneys just aren't all that complicated. I think it's the latter.
Christian Bale is magnificent in his impersonation of Cheney, not only in his embodying of each mannerism but in his endowing each facet of Cheney's persona with its own purpose. He and McKay have rightly noticed that Cheney's odd way of speaking--in low tones with frequent pauses--demands that his audience listen closely and pay attention, and endows whatever he's saying with a certain gravitas. That was Cheney's game, and Bale gets it.
But how do you make a movie about someone who isn't there? McKay struggles in compiling a subject out of the elusive Cheney. The only real path he has to follow is the audacity of Cheney's ambition and the lengths he goes to in order to grabbing power. To McKay's credit, he still manages a few surprises here: the best scenes are of Cheney's days in the Ford Administration, in which he discovers disturbing loopholes in the limits on the President's power with the help of a young lawyer named Antonin Scalia (Sam Massaro), and of his early days in the W. Bush administration, in which he is constantly amassing influence, bypassing rules, and confirming his general omnipotence with the help of Rumsfeld, lawyer David Addington (Don McManus), chief of staff Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk, slimy), and deputy Sec. Def. Paul Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan, also slimy). It's in these scenes that the movie feels authentic, and we see to the core of Cheney's opportunism and nihilism.
But McKay doesn't stick with it, probably because there's too much mud to sling. Detailing Dick Cheney's offenses would take the better part of a miniseries. Making hay out of Cheney is similar, I guess, to trying to make any scandals stick to the current occupant of the White House: there's too much. Focus too closely on one infraction and you're ignoring tons of others. Try to cover them all and you spread yourself too thin. Vice's unifying message, if there is one, is delivered in the revelation of Kurt's identity, which is clever but simplistic: at the end, the only thing to take from Cheney's life is that he has no soul, and until recently he had no heart either.
** out of ****
