By J. Thomas Perdue

For 132 minutes, I was bludgeoned by Adam McKay’s Vice, a historical, biographical comedy-drama detailing the life of the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history, Dick Cheney, played by Christian Bale. Detailing Cheney’s checkered youth as a Yale dropout-turned Wyoming lineman through his ascendance to the nation’s de facto driver’s seat, Vice is a tornado of ham-fisted messaging, caricature-level portrayals, and historical… let’s call it convenience.

Going into this film, yes, I know that Dick Cheney is not an approved commodity among the people who make these movies, or indeed, most Americans (after all, his approval rating was dipping below 30% when he left office). But it becomes clear as the movie progresses that writer/director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, The Big Short) is not trying to offer a thoughtful critique of neo-conservatism or American politics en masse. He’s crafting the right-wing boogeyman on whom we would blame all our problems today, were we not so engorged on bread and circus.

Where Vice shines is with its protagonist. Christian Bale is almost perfect in the role of Cheney. The method actor loses himself in the character as he gains weight and loses hair over the course of about fifty years. He perfectly captures Cheney’s grin and method of muffled speaking out the side of his mouth. This is what the 22-year-old me remembers first noticing about the real-life Cheney. His ruthlessness, and his domination of any room or conversation is nothing short of mesmerizing.

To Bale’s credit, and to Vice’s demise, his performance is too good for the film. The rest of the cast, including Sam Rockwell’s imbecilic George W. Bush and Steve Carell’s near-sadistic Donald Rumsfeld, makes up a series of the aforementioned caricatures. They might as well have let Will Ferrell do his Saturday Night Live shtick as the bumbling Dubya. Amy Adams is competent as Lynne Cheney, although the writers have her going back-and-forth between Lady Macbeth and an exposition machine for the film’s first act. She is at least believable, serving as Dick’s motivation during his rise. He establishes his role as paterfamilias of U.S. foreign policy only after establishing himself as an immovable father and husband.

Separating the performances and pacing of Vice from their historical context is not easy. If McKay intended to isolate his critique to the Bush-Cheney presidency, or if he intended to make an unserious film, historical criticism may not be warranted. But it’s clear that Vice takes itself seriously, thus allowing for open season on his laughable view of the past five decades and the political movements within them.

The first scene that made me laugh out loud was probably not intended to. Upon learning about Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, Dick is taken aback. He turns to Rumsfeld, his boss at the time, and asks, “What do we believe?” Rummy replies with about 15 seconds of manic laughter. “That’s a good one!” And this is where you lose me.

See, this is where making a movie about someone who you so obviously revile becomes tough. It’s implied that this is Cheney’s initiation into the world of heartless politics. (He even makes his decision to become a Republican on a coin-toss like decision.) McKay views the right wing as a big reactionary scam. It is a vehicle in which Cheney and others simply ride to power. A narrator tells us “Big money families like the Kochs and the Coors that were sick of paying income taxes, rolled into Washington D.C. and started writing fat checks to fund right wing think tanks,” followed by cuts to the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute, etc. Cheney also runs into Roger Ailes in a hallway at one point, an absolutely inconsequential meeting that allows for a dose of potshots at Fox News, which, the narrator tells us, “would go on to dominate all other news and swing America more to the right.”

At that point, I could say with all sincerity that I no longer accept the premise. It’s not the bias that’s so off-putting, it’s the unwillingness to consider that at least a few people who might be on a different side as McKay want to do the right thing. McKay sees institutions like Fox News and the Koch brothers as creators of the right, not the other way around. But this must be the premise. Hell, you could even use negative phrasing. Call them symptoms, manipulators, hijackers! Vice would have you believe that the chicken salad sandwich came before the egg.  

Throughout Vice, McKay wields the idea that conservative politics begins and ends with wealthy lobbyists leading unwashed rednecks, and that intellectuals like Cheney and Rumsfeld are heartless opportunists like Nietzsche’s two hammers. And he runs up to my cushioned seat and beats me to death with them. During Cheney’s heart transplant, a long, unmoving shot rests on the removed heart, sitting on a table. Get it? Do you get that? They’re saying it’s because he’s… nah you get it.

Vice was very well shot, it had a remarkable lead, a dull supporting cast, a braindead message, and a run time of about 20 minutes too long. Oliver Stone at least directed his historical dramas like such absurd fever dreams that they were rarely taken seriously. In a way, that was decent of him. Vice styles itself as a serious movie, and it handles serious subject matter. In the end, McKay puts a good deal of the blame for his 21^st century hell-scape not on Cheney, but on you, the American viewer who voted him in and didn’t pay attention when your freedoms were eroded. And if you aren’t paying attention to what McKay is doing now, peddling comically skewed politics and history, and his switch from making buddy comedies to political biopics turns out to be a permanent one, well that’ll be your fault too.

(Assignment notes: I saw this movie at the AMC Dine-In Theater on Lexington Rd, in Athens, Ga on 2/12/19.)