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Christian Bale slaps on the make-up as Dick Cheney in Vice |
Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Christian Bale (Dick Cheney), Amy Adams (Lynne
Cheney), Steve Carell (Donald Rumsfield), Sam Rockwell (George W Bush), Alison
Pill (Mary Cheney), Lily Rabe (Liz Cheney), Jesse Plemons (Kurt), Tyler Perry
(Colin Powell), Justin Kirk (Scooter Libby), LisaGay Hamilton (Condoleezza
Rice), Eddie Marsan (Paul Wolfowitz), Bill Camp (Gerald Ford), Don McManus
(David Addington)
There is a film to be made about the turmoil of the Bush
presidency. It’s not this film. Adam McKay’s flashy, clumsy, cartoonish, smug,
tedious, overlong, arrogant and polemical film quickly outstays its welcome,
drowning any legitimate ideas and theories it has under a wave of high-minded,
angry shouting at the viewer, frequently mistaking flash and bombast for actual
political insight and producing the sort of heavy-handed, angry political
commentary that wouldn’t look out of place in a cheap student review. And
flipping heck I’m on the liberal left!
Anyway, the film follows the career of Dick Cheney
(Christian Bale under an impressive pile of make-up) from his early wash-out
days. Told by his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) to buck his ideas up or lose her,
Cheney becomes an intern for Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), rising
through the ranks due to his ruthless efficiency and loyalty, becoming Chief of
Staff under Ford and Secretary of Defence under Bush. So he’s a natural choice
for the inexperienced George W Bush (Sam Rockwell) to balance the presidential
ticket. In return, though, Cheney wants control over a few areas – energy,
foreign policy, defence etc. etc. – that the lazy Bush has no interest in
overseeing. So a quiet, backroom politician changes the office of the Vice
President to become the most powerful man in the world. Boo hiss.
McKay’s intention with this film is to reveal the
hollowness, greed and utter lack of integrity in its subject. Well he never
lets us forget this aim – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so openly
hated its lead character, which so completely refused to see any redeeming qualities in him
whatsoever. Christ, even Downfall
took a few minutes to show Hitler was generally kind to those who worked for
him. The film is so unrelenting in its loathing for Cheney that it starts to
feel like a being shouted out for over two hours by an “it’s the end of the
world” fanatic on a street corner. This does not make for good entertainment.
The film has no subtlety whatsoever. Not for a single second
does it even consider the remote possibility that anyone in the Republican
party might, perhaps, just maybe, even if it was only some of the time, believe
that they were doing something for a principled reason, even if it was a
principle those on the left don’t agree with. Instead, all the characters are
shown as selfish, greedy and corrupt, using ideology solely to gain power and
then using power only to enrich themselves. It’s the sort of lazy political
views that turn people off liberals – the idea that anyone who doesn’t share a
liberal viewpoint is by definition evil. Some of us grew out of this kneejerk
assumption that everyone who doesn’t agree with us is self-serving and cruel.
Not McKay.
On top of which, McKay’s film is made with the overt flash
and brio that is the hallmark of the hack director using the tools of cinema
with no understanding of their proper use. Wonky camerawork, cutting between
timelines, throwing in newsreel footage, breaking the fourth wall, using
strange camera angles, chucking in cameo actors to amusingly comment on events
(Alfred Molina and Naomi Watts principally) and editing it with flash don’t
make you a great director. They make you someone who has seen a lot of films
and lot of techniques, but has no understanding of how to use them to craft an
overall effect, instead thinking that if you throw all of them at the wall at
once, you’ll be a master craftsman.
The film is full of studenty bits of invention that must
have seemed oh-so-clever on paper in
McKay’s script. Forty minutes in, with Cheney’s career looking over with the
end of the Bush presidency, McKay starts running the credits – only to snap
back into the film with the fateful phone call from Dubya. It’s clever and
raises a quick chuckle, but doesn’t add anything to a sense of turning point in
Cheney’s life. It’s followed by a clumsy metaphor of moments being like tea
cups balanced on top of each other (inevitably these are later shown tumbling
down) to represent how key moments of history build on each other. The real
nadir is a moment when Dick and Lynne fall back into cod-Shakespearean dialogue
in the bedroom as they discuss a possible vice presidency. ‘We don’t have
Shakespeare’s psychologically insightful dialogue’ (I paraphrase) says the
voiceover, before this skin-crawling hand-in-mouth sequence that shows McKay
knows as much about Shakespeare as he does subtle political commentary.
Ah yes the voiceover. Perhaps not knowing how to marshall
his childish political points in actual scenes and dialogue, McKay uses a
voiceover from Jesse Plemons’ ground-forces marine to spell out as bluntly and
crudely as possible the basic and trivial points it wants to make. The damn
film already feels like being hectored by a crank, so why not make it feel even
more like a polemic by having a character bitterly explain why everything is
wicked and evil at you? The narration bores – and joins the general feeling of the
rest of the film, that it goes on forever and ever and ever and never, ever,
ever says something really interesting or revealing.
The performances are a mixed bag. Bale gives a decent turn
as Cheney, capturing his mannerisms and conveying a sense of dark ambition, but
it’s a role he could play standing on his head. Amy Adams turns Lynne into a
Lady Macbeth, in a reheat of her performance from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Every other performance is a
crude cartoon – Carell’s Rumsfeld a putty-faced joke, Sam Rockwell’s Bush (an
impossibly generous Oscar nomination) a cartoonish buffoon. Everyone else
coasts through it, patting themselves on the back.
There is an argument to be made that Cheney’s legacy is far
from good, and it’s certain that we are paying a heavy price for interventions
in Iraq. Many of the policies were less than savoury and left a less than
positive benefit. But this film hammers these points home with all the charm of
a ranting, drunk politics student who has read one book and watched a lot of
YouTube videos. With McKay’s soulless, clumsy, look-at-me direction layered on
top, this is a flat out terrible film. Save yourself what feels like much more
than its two hour run time. In fact I’ll summarise it for you: CHENEY IS EVIL
AND HORRIBLE AND HE (LITERALLY) HAS NO HEART. There you go. You don’t need to
see it now.
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