Vice review: a crazily good Christian Bale turns Dick Cheney into every liberal's worst nightmare
Dir: Adam McKay; Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Jesse Plemons. 15 cert, 132 mins
For his new film about the former American Vice President Dick Cheney, Adam McKay seems to have drawn a certain degree of stylistic inspiration from his subject. It is a head-spinning shock-and-awe satire that comes in hot then cranks up the thermostat to infernal – a Molotov cocktail of biopic, documentary and black comedy, with a thrillingly short fuse.
Spanning the half-century from Cheney’s drink-driving conviction at the age of 21 to his heart transplant at 71, Vice is fragmented both out of necessity and by design: to account for the holes in the story, an opening series of captions describes Cheney as “one of the most secretive leaders in recent history,” before adding with jut-chinned bravado, “We did our f___ing best.” But this being an Adam McKay film – and specifically, the first since his 2015 financial crisis farce The Big Short – madcap is the selling point.
After introducing its central figure as a callow, boozy drop-out, the film whip-cracks into the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, with the now-middle-aged Cheney ensconced in the situation room, barking orders on the President’s behalf. Throughout, he is played by a crazily good Christian Bale, whose physical form is wadded to a bearlike bulk, and his face reshaped with eerily plausible prosthetics that give him the look of a malevolent Chevy Chase.
But the performance itself is magnetically and meticulously all Bale – he must be one of the few actors who can lumber with precision. And at times – particularly the acid bath of a final monologue – it feels almost like a sequel to the actor’s breakthrough role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
Before then, another narrator has been guiding us along: an affable everyman called Kurt, played by Jesse Plemons, whose connection to Cheney is revealed late in the game, in a bone-chilling black-comedy gambit that lands with the force of a great Sacha Baron Cohen skit.
Vice wears its Hollywood liberal credentials on its sleeve, and pins the current disarray in Washington squarely on Cheney, who the film suggests had an outsize influence in reshaping the American right after Nixon’s resignation – particularly during the second Bush presidency, in which he ascended to VP. Dubya himself, drolly played here by Sam Rockwell, is just the figurehead who scores well in the polls: Cheney was in charge, and set about replacing coherent conservative ideology with the pursuit of power for power’s sake.
Two figures in Cheney’s life seem to be instrumental in his adoption of this philosophy: the first is Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), an inveterate schemer who is seized by a giggling fit when the young Cheney naively asks him what they believe in. The second is Cheney’s wife Lynne (Amy Adams), a Lady Macbeth in a skirt suit, whose own gimlet-eyed ambition is channeled through her husband. McKay seizes on the obvious Shakespearean parallel, and in one scene has Dick and Lynne scheme in their bedchamber in iambic pentameter, while thunder cracks theatrically outside.
Vice is full of these high-concept zig-zags and cutaways: as in The Big Short, some are more convincing than others. But a handful are really built to last, such as the truly Strangelovean interlude in which an unctuous waiter played by Alfred Molina tempts Cheney and his dining companions with various euphemistic atrocities – “We have an extraordinary rendition”, and so on – as if they’re well-cellared reds. If that idea appeals, Vice has been crafted with your tastes in mind.
Those hoping for a neatly packaged biopic, on the other hand, may feel short-changed: some portions of Cheney’s life which feel important are barely mentioned, not least the first Gulf War, which took place during his term as Secretary of Defence under George Bush Snr.
You almost certainly will not walk away from Vice with a crisp new perspective on its protagonist, and its blunt rejection of the notion he ever held any meaningful political convictions will surely enrage any Cheney admirers who deign to see it. But as a prequel to the present American mayhem, it is grimly, hilariously persuasive.
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