Film Review - Vice (15)

I want you to be my VP. I want you. You're my Vice.

Vice is a timely reminder that the American madness of the modern era didn't begin with Donald Trump. There's a tendency to look back now with a kind of ironic fondness on the George W Bush days and forget that they had an insanity all their own - one that helped rearrange world politics beyond recognition. Adam McKay's film takes us through the whole global shit-storm in the wily company of Dick Cheney, Vice President in the Bush administration and the man universally considered to be the power behind that throne. It's a wild, darkly funny and - for those who didn't live through it - genuinely shocking ride, where the head-spinning decisions being made in the White House are matched by those of the writer-director on the screen.

The film takes us back to the '60s, when college drop-out Cheney (Christian Bale) is in danger of self-destructing even before his career has begun. Knocked into shape by his formidable girlfriend-soon-wife Lynne (Amy Adams), he heads for Washington DC and establishes himself in successive Republican administrations, with experienced operator Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) showing him the ropes. But it is during Bush Jnr's run for the Presidency that Cheney gets to demonstrate his full political skill-set, becoming - through cunning and quiet force of will - the most powerful man in government and a ruthless decision-maker at a time of national and worldwide crisis. The hijacking of US conservatism by extremist thinking, this movie suggests, happened long before a certain TV reality host took the Oath of Office.

Vice is five decades' worth of US political history put through a satirical meat-grinder. McKay, who skewered the US financial markets in 2015's The Big Short, learned his craft on Saturday Night Live, and those comedy roots show here. Not that the players are SNL-style stereotypes (there are some meaty dramatic performances), but the director takes that raw material and forges it into the maddest, most irreverent history lecture you've ever experienced. Voice-over, captions, razor-sharp edits, bursts of surrealism, fourth-wall-smashing and a few other directorial flourishes way too brazen to spoil here - McKay uses it all to lampoon to increasing gall of Cheney and his associates as they rewrite the Washington rule-book. Laughter and dread are fused together as events turn more serious, not least when the future-VP starts toying with the Unitary Executive Theory, an idea truly taken from the Dark Arts of US political thinking.

Beneath all the visual craziness (along with increasing layers of convincing prosthetic) is Bale's movie-grounding performance. Its brilliance comes from portraying manipulative genius in a character who's also a charisma-vacuum. His Cheney is inscrutable throughout, hinting at all the machinations going on beneath an impenetrable surface. Adams brings all the nuance and ambiguity you'd expect to wife Lynne, a woman who inspires admiration one moment and then appalls you the next. Their family life serves as a normalising counterpoint to all the political intrigue, though even that can't remain entirely uninfected. Carell's Rumsfeld is chilling beneath a rakishly jokey surface, while Sam Rockwell skillfully brings George W. Bush back from the world of SNL caricature and makes him real again, however gullible and out of his depth.

What is absent from this tale is any clear sense of what pushes family-man Cheney to the extreme measures he takes in office. One recurring metaphor suggests how he operates, but not his motivation. Is it political ideology, a craving to exert power, or a twisted marriage of the two? Ultimately McKay leaves the answers locked deep in the man's mind, focusing on what was done, rather than why. And the what - seeing it all unspool with such devastating results over two short hours - is quite mind-blowing. It truncates modern history mercilessly, sure, and some conservatives will brand it liberal propaganda. But Vice still carries out one hell of a dissection of the Bush/Cheney administration, along with its study of the man who pulled the strings. As political cinema goes, it's grim, hilarious and essential. And yes, that is Christian Bale.

Gut Reaction: Entertained and appalled. At the same time. That'd be enterpalled, then.  

Memorable Moment: So who is the mystery narrator? Oh that's who! 

Ed's Verdict: 8.5/10. Grandly ambitious, this has the spliced and diced quality of Oliver Stone, with the demented spin of the guy who created Anchorman. Yet so much of it rings horribly true. Compelling, treacle-dark stuff.