Adam McKay (2018)
The title’s succinct pun is a hefty hint that Adam McKay comes to bury not to praise George W Bush’s Vice-President. To make his position even clearer, McKay opens with a title card: ‘The following is a true story. Or as true as it can be given that Dick Cheney is known as one of the most secretive leaders in recent history. But we did our fucking best.’ What follows is a series of illustrations of the awfulness of Cheney, his wife Lynne and his political familiars. Some of the illustrations have bite and invention but the approach is limiting: Vice, almost inevitably, is less than the sum of its parts. That ‘fucking’ in the title card announces the prevailing tone of sarcastic, angry derision. Angry isn’t quite the word, though – bad-tempered is nearer the mark. Besides – as in his previous film, The Big Short – McKay’s determination to show how smart he is tends to upstage his outrage at the main characters’ behaviour.
The director (who also wrote the screenplay) won’t let Dick Cheney get away with anything, let alone political chicanery. In an early flashback to Wyoming in 1963, a twenty-two-year-old Cheney (Christian Bale), stopped by traffic cops, sprawls drunkenly out of his car – obviously unfit for public office decades later. (Alcohol problems are a reason why, soon afterwards, he drops out of Yale.) Still more revealing of McKay’s treatment is a scene about an hour through the film. Cheney and Lynne (Amy Adams) are getting ready for bed. The future Vice-President is cleaning his teeth. The insistent noise on the soundtrack of a toothbrush doing its work reinforces the impression we’ve gained by now of a man who doesn’t do things by halves. Then he starts on the mouthwash: he stands with his great belly pressing against his pyjama jacket, rinses lengthily, spits into the wash-basin. Although no one, perhaps especially an overweight man, is likely to look good doing this routine, Adam McKay manages to make his protagonist’s dental ablutions seem uniquely revolting.
The bathroom sequence occurs just as Vice has really hit its stride. The first hour, although never dull, lacks The Big Short’s narrative drive (that movie often played as a very singular action thriller). Having served as White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford and Secretary of Defense under George H W Bush, Cheney harbours presidential ambitions but, after Bill Clinton’s election win in 1992, decides to end his political career. A main consideration is that his and Lynne’s younger daughter Mary (Alison Pill) is gay; her father is concerned to spare the family media scrutiny. As in The Big Short, McKay shows a taste – and a talent – for storytelling curveballs. When Cheney retires from public life, a waggish false epilogue appears on the screen, explaining that he became CEO of the multinational Halliburton Corporation, he and Lynne retired to Virginia where she continued to write books and breed golden retrievers, and so on. McKay even puts up a premature cast list. He then cuts to Cheney receiving a phone call from the office of George W Bush, now the prospective Republican presidential candidate for 2000, who is looking for his running mate. It’s from this point that Vice picks up pace.
The relative lack of momentum in what’s gone before is due partly to the voiceover narration. In The Big Short, the Ryan Gosling character was from the outset the audience’s guide through, and very evidently a creature of, the Wall Street underworld. In Vice, the narrative voice – so lightly jocose that it’s the closest the film gets to neutrality – goes unidentified for much longer. Only just before the epilogue trick do we get sight of the man (Jesse Plemons) telling the story. His name is Kurt and he’s a kind of American everyman. He first appears as a blue-collar worker; in due course, he’s a soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq. While it’s understandable that McKay wants to keep Kurt’s identity under wraps so that his eventual appearance is a payoff (and it is), doing so somehow muffles up the early part of the film.
The bogus ending isn’t the only surprise tactic McKay uses to sharpen Vice’s satirical or dramatic edge. Kurt notes the difficulty of knowing exactly what went on in discussions between Cheney and his wife about whether he should accept Bush’s running-mate offer: after all, says Kurt, we can’t have a Shakespearean dialogue to tell us what they were thinking. The Cheneys go to bed (this is immediately after the mouthwash episode) and a faux-Shakespearean dialogue is just what McKay has them (as if they were the Macbeths) deliver. His best narrative coup comes late in the film. After Cheney truly retires from public office, following his eight years as Vice-President, the cardiovascular disease that has already caused several heart attacks worsens and he appears to be at death’s door. Kurt, out jogging, pops up to explain the situation. He’s promptly hit by a car and fatally injured, and is the donor of Cheney’s new heart[1].
When the younger Bush first asks Cheney to be ‘my Vice’, the answer is no. The Machiavellian Lynne is particularly dismissive of a job often regarded as the biggest sinecure in global politics. Once they absorb the implications of a a Vice-President potentially having one foot in the legislature and the other in the executive, the Cheneys change their mind. Dick accepts the invitation on condition that Bush delegate to him ‘mundane’ executive responsibilities – such as foreign policy, defence and energy. Vice, to quote its trailer, ‘is the true story of how an uncharismatic Vice President became the most powerful man in the world and hardly anyone made a peep’. Once the 2000 election has happened and Bush is in the White House, however, the movie’s momentum begins to ebb, albeit slowly. McKay has already included, at the very beginning, a 9/11 sequence showing Cheney at the helm of White House operations in Washington as the terrorist attack is taking place (Bush being in Florida that morning). Although it’s impossible to make 9/11 anti-climactic, McKay does slightly reduce its charge, when the main story reaches September 2001, by having included this earlier sequence. Nothing that follows – the War on Terror invasions and torture, brief references to scandals such as the Plame affair[2], Cheney’s shafting of Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) leading to the latter’s resignation as Secretary of Defense – has much impact. This isn’t because the events in question are already well known (there’s still a charge to the clips of news film that McKay repeatedly works into the narrative) – although, in dramatic terms, they amount to a list. It’s because the perspective of Vice is unvarying and becomes tiresome.
It follows that the one element of the closing stages that registers relatively (only relatively) strongly is the one element that has hitherto shown Cheney in a not unfavourable light – his commitment to his wife and daughters. The tension between fatherly constancy and political imperative becomes too much when the elder daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) runs for Senate in 2014. Her sister Mary’s recent marriage to another woman is seen as part of Liz’s difficulty in making opinion poll headway with Republican voters so her parents assent to Liz’s publicly stating her opposition to same-sex marriage[3]. In the course of the film, Adam McKay repeatedly closes in on Cheney’s face to reveal his moral bankruptcy. When he does so at this point, the family betrayal element calls to mind the great closing shot of Michael Corleone’s face in The Godfather: Part II. The sense of connection between the two is short-lived, though. You’re soon reflecting, rather, on the moral distance Michael travelled to reach this point. McKay’s leading man has, in too many ways, stayed in the same place throughout.
Christian Bale, literally unrecognisable under remarkable make-up (by Greg Cannon) and the three stone he put on to play Cheney, stays very true to the latter’s notorious lack of charisma: the result is both comical and disturbing. Bale’s Cheney has an implacable dullness – he’s immoveable object rather than irresistible force. This is Bale’s most disciplined work to date. Amy Adams is similarly controlled and impressive as Lynne: she brilliantly expresses a sharp, startlingly narrow mind. McKay does a fine job of orchestrating the cast, considering how different the actors’ approaches are. The portraits of George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are cartoons – though of a high order. Sam Rockwell’s Bush, as well as being a spot-on impersonation, is highly enjoyable: I preferred this turn to Rockwell’s multi-award-winning performance (also a turn) in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – not least because no one is going to mistake his showboating for profundity this time around. That said, Rockwell occasionally makes the out-of-his-depth Dubya bizarrely touching. It was a relief, just a few days after Beautiful Boy, to see Steve Carell enjoying himself as Rumsfeld.
In his last meta moment, McKay interrupts the closing credits with a sequence in which a focus group discusses the film. One (heavy-set) man complains it’s too liberal, another (weedy) man takes issue, the illiberal man knocks the liberal to the ground and the whole thing descends into chaos. Yet it’s a striking feature of Vice that it’s not essentially a typical Trump-era movie. There are resonances with more recent political developments – Lynne Cheney inveighing (in 1978) against snobby liberals; news film of Reagan promising to make America great again. You shudder at the prospect of the ‘unitary executive theory’ that’s discussed in the movie being put to further use by the present Commander-in-Chief. Overall, however, the Dick Cheney story functions as a caution against false nostalgia for the big-hitters of Republican administrations of an earlier vintage.
At 132 minutes, Vice has an almost identical running time to The Big Short yet this new film feels much longer. McKay would have done well to be more selective. After the transplant episode, there’s a lingering shot of the protagonist’s diseased, extracted heart – a strong symbolic image that would have served well as a parting shot. But we move on, via the Liz Cheney Senate run, to her father giving a television interview. Midway through an answer to the interviewer’s question, he adjusts his position slightly and turns to camera. Breaking the fourth wall, he angrily defends everything he’s done: he has no regrets. Although Christian Bale’s delivery of this speech is formidably good, you feel it’s the second time the film has ended – not counting that false ending over an hour earlier. And there’s still the mid-credits focus group to come. Adam McKay really doesn’t know when to stop.
29 January 2019
[1] Cheney actually underwent heart transplant surgery – the heart supplied by an anonymous donor – in 2012.
[2] Dramatised in Doug Liman’s Fair Game (2010).
[3] I’m not sure whether the film’s emphasis is factually accurate. Liz Cheney’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination for Senator in Wyoming is summarised in her Wikipedia profile as follows: ‘Cheney’s campaign was marred by criticism from her past championing of hawkish foreign policy positions to a public spat with her sister Mary over her refusal to support same-sex marriage [my italics]. … On January 6, 2014, Cheney announced she had withdrawn from the race, citing family health issues’.
