Directed by: Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell
Rated R, 132 minutes
One of the more surprising Hollywood career transformations this century has been that of writer-director Adam McKay. Having made his name on Will Ferrell vehicles like “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights,” McKay never seemed destined to make prestige films. And yet, here we are a decade later, and McKay is already an Oscar winner (for writing “The Big Short”), with three more nominations this year for his Dick Cheney biopic “Vice.” But while he’s had more success on the awards circuit in recent years, his style has remained fundamentally the same; regardless of subject matter, McKay falls back on the tried-and-true theory that any joke can work, if you just sell it hard enough.
What McKay has always lacked, it seems, is the ability (or willingness) to edit himself, and that remains true as well. “Vice” is overindulgent in just about every way, the sort of movie you get when every idea that comes up in the first brainstorming session makes it into the finished product. Maybe this strategy worked in McKay’s earlier Will Ferrell comedies, but “Vice,” boasting everything from a narrator to a fake credits sequence to a scene performed in Shakespearean English, too often relies on the kitchen sink to clean itself. It’s over two hours long, and it feels like it.
The irony of “Vice” is that this garish and messy treatment is given to a man that the movie paints as reticent and cautious, a quiet schemer unimpressed by flashiness. Christian Bale (“American Hustle”), as Cheney, does a great impression of the man, mumbling orders out the side of his mouth and ambling around Washington in his corpulent frame; even in the little moments—wiping pastry crumbs from his fingers, leaning back in the chair in his new office, quietly announcing that he’s having a heart attack—Bale carries himself with the confidence of a man who believes in himself, fully and unapologetically.
Bale’s performance is all the more impressive, given the script’s notably unflattering view of Cheney. Consider that the movie continues telling Cheney’s story past his years in office, and up to his heart transplant in 2012; when the doctors remove his heart and set it aside, we linger for several seconds on the image of his old, shriveled heart, while in the background he receives the heart of a much younger man. The movie complains, out loud, that its own protagonist isn’t dead yet.
To many, this sort of treatment will feel justified; as the movie asserts again and again, Cheney’s decisions behind closed doors rippled out into the world, often with terrible consequences. The scene where he convinces George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) to invade Iraq, for instance, is interrupted by glimpses of Iraqi villagers going about their day, suddenly engulfed in the fiery terror of an airstrike—almost an exact replica of an earlier scene depicting the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia during Nixon’s presidency. And then there are the hypocrisies of Cheney’s personal life, such as the time he accidentally shot a hunting buddy in the face, after which the victim went on TV to apologize to his good friend Dick. The film might be told from Cheney’s point of view, but McKay uses the opportunity to lay out one example after another of the man’s indifference to the suffering of others. The film is infuriating, and intentionally so.
“You chose me,” Cheney growls at the viewer at the film’s end, looking directly into the camera (another gimmicky McKayism). There’s nothing we can do to respond, of course, no way to argue back. The moment is the first and only one to leave us feeling truly helpless; it’s a climax seemingly intended to provoke us into action, to make us leave the theater and use our built-up frustration for something productive. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late; with a wandering focus and too much pride in its anything-goes stylistic choices, the movie is equally likely to make us angry at McKay himself, for being too easily distracted to get to the point. It’s admirable that he wants to hold accountable the greedy men who wield power like a weapon, but “Vice” does a better job of demonstrating that it’s sloppiness, not ruthlessness, that does the most harm.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 2/8/19.