Vice: Evolution of a monster?

Vice (2018) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for profanity and violent images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.11.19

It’s sad when the whole doesn’t live up to the sum of its parts.

Vice is turbo-charged by a jaw-dropping performance from star Christian Bale: as wholly immersive as Gary Oldman’s similarly masterful portrayal of Winston Churchill, in 2017’s Darkest Hour. Bale’s impersonation is equally convincing; at times, you’d swear that Dick Cheney himself were on the screen.

The fateful meeting: Presidential candidate George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, right) wants
Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) as his running mate, a traditionally toothless position that
interests the latter not at all ... until he perceives the degree to which this particular
U.S. president could be controlled and manipulated.

Bale is (in)famous for putting soul andbody into his performances, having dropped 70 pounds for his emaciated role in 2004’s The Machinist, then regaining the weight — plus another 30 pounds — the following year, for the first of his three stints as Batman/Bruce Wayne. More recently, he briefly porked up to 228 for the convincing pot belly sported in 2013’s American Hustle.

Now, in order to step that much more persuasively into Cheney’s shoes, Bale bleached his eyebrows, shaved his head … and gained 40 pounds.

But Bale doesn’t rely exclusively on such physical attributes; he wholly inhabits the man’s bearing, stance, brooding gaze and terse, clipped manner of speech. And the most important feature of all: the reptilian, thousand-yard stare with which Cheney could cut a person dead (or, at the very least, render the recipient into cowed silence).

Amy Adams doesn’t rest in Bale’s shadow. Her handling of Cheney’s wife Lynne is equally compelling, Adams’ acting chops every bit as authoritative. Writer/director Adam McKay clearly has assumed that just as Cheney was the (mostly) unseen power behind George W. Bush, Lynne was the (mostly) unseen power behind her husband.

Vice more or less profiles Cheney’s rise from alcoholic twentysomething ne’er-do-well to Master of the World: an often macabre and deeply disturbing validation of the old warning that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

McKay audaciously acknowledges, via introductory lines of text against an otherwise black screen, that he couldn’t possibly have any inside knowledge regarding many (most? all?) of the conversations taking place between this cheeky film’s numerous real-world characters. Even so, the blend of supposition and known fact is — at times — grimly unsettling, particularly when further juxtaposed against McKay’s satiric tone.

It’s not easy to simultaneously chuckle and gasp with revulsion, but you’ll do so. More than once.

But Vice isn’t nearly as successful — or darkly entertaining — as 2015’s The Big Short, which brought McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph a well-deserved screenplay Academy Award. That film clocked in at 130 minutes, but it breezed right along; at a similar 132 minutes, Vice often plods. Nor does this new film have as many of the sidebar cutaways, flashbacks or mischievous, break-the-fourth-wall commentaries that made The Big Short so much fun.

That said, McKay definitely scores with a couple of bits: most notably a posh D.C. restaurant dinner during which Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) and two similarly power-mongering associates listen attentively as a solicitous waiter (an unbilled Alfred Molina) offers a menu of U.S. Constitutional rights that are ripe for subversion.

And it’s certainly true that this film relies on the most impudent narrator — Jesse Plemons, as Kurt — since William Holden’s turn in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard.

The problem, though — which becomes worse, as the film proceeds — is that McKay is too smug, too full of himself, too determined to beat us over the head. The Big Short gained much of its allure from the always clever way it guided viewers through a complicated but crucially important topic — economics — with which most of us were unfamiliar.

But everybody already knows that Cheney is a bloodthirsty, Machiavellian puppet master and destroyer of civil rights, who believes that plutocracy and corporatocracy should be the laws of the land; this isn’t news. The only question is whether a given viewer agrees with such a philosophy, or finds it repugnant. McKay’s position on that fence is obvious, and — as a result — this film too frequently becomes self-righteous, when it should be engaging.

Even so, there’s no denying the gleeful relish with which Bale, Adams and their co-stars tackle their various roles. Rockwell’s handling of George W. Bush is fascinating, for the way he captures the good ol’ boy bluster of a man who instinctively knows that he’s in way over his head, but doesn’t want anybody else to recognize as much. And yet — and this is the genius of Rockwell’s performance — this Gee-Dubya isn’t savvy enough to pull off that necessary charade. Even simple questions leave him briefly foxed, like a small child still learning how to speak.

He’s easy prey for somebody like Cheney, and one of this film’s strongest scenes comes when the campaigning Bush offers Cheney the sidekick role. Bale’s barracuda eyes narrow, as Cheney studies Bush and calculates, quickly realizing that he’d be the true power in the White House. It’s a chilling moment.

Carell’s Rumsfeld is equally engaging: a jocular, unapologetic hawk who — when they first meet years earlier, as Cheney begins his D.C. career as a congressional intern — dispenses pearls of wisdom that are equal parts shrewd and profane. These two eventually are joined by like-minded David Addington (Don McManus) and Paul Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan), both of whom concoct imaginative methods of subverting congressional checks and balances.

The most pernicious ploy comes from Addington, who — at a key moment — supplies Cheney with the disturbing premise of law now known as the “unitary executive theory,” based on a perverted reading of the U.S. Constitution’s Article Two. In a brazen example of Orwellian doublethink, this theory boldly asserts that any act taken by the U.S. president (or vice-president), even if scandalously illegal, can’t be illegal, because the president has absolute authority, and therefore — by definition — anything he does is legal.

In other words, Cheney and Addington forever changed the world, by orchestrating the paradigm that more recently has been used to justify every action by the current White House occupant.

In the wake of 9/11, Cheney’s consolidation of power is augmented further by the infamous “torture memos” drafted by U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Choon Yoo (Paul Yoo, appropriately toadying). These insisted, with similar doublethink shamelessness, that since the United States does not engage in torture, anything done in an effort to extract information from suspects — stress binding, waterboarding, sleep deprivation or (one assumes) anything short of the rack or Iron Maiden — is, by definition, not torture.

(Yoo has been a “distinguished” law professor at UC Berkeley for years, where — no doubt — his presence has been an ongoing source of discomfort. And from where he continues to fire off eyebrow-raising articles, editorials and legal opinions that appear in national newspapers and magazines.)

This rogue’s gallery of sycophants is leavened by two noble souls: Tyler Perry’s dignified handling of Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State during the younger Bush’s first term. Perry’s increasingly despondent expressions, in the face of such pernicious behavior, are quite telling.

Alison Pill is equally memorable — and, ultimately, heartbreaking — as Cheney’s younger daughter Mary, who inadvertently becomes a pivot point in both her family’s dynamic, and her father’s public behavior.

At its best moments, McKay’s film makes us feel like privileged voyeurs somehow able to eavesdrop on the scandalous behavior and dire doings that contributed greatly to the current mess on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, such moments are few and far between; McKay more frequently becomes a bullying dogmatist.

We left The Big Short feeling both horrified and exhilarated. We leave Vice feeling mostly exhausted.

Not, I suspect, the result McKay intended.