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.
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| 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.
