Vice Is a Frenetic Portrait of Dick Cheney, Devious Sociopath

This year gave us several films by American filmmakers who obviously were inspired by renegade cinema vets. Jonah Hill’s nostalgic skateboarding debut Mid90s is basically Larry Clark lite, while Vox Lux sees Brady Corbet telling the story of Natalie Portman’s pop diva like a more empathetic, less deranged Lars von Trier. 

And now we have Vice, wherein Adam McKay — responsible for writing some of Will Ferrell’s most ridiculous moments both on Saturday Night Live and the big screen — goes full Oliver Stone with a frenetic, frazzled biopic of polarizing former Vice President Dick Cheney. (Never mind that Stone already covered this territory a decade ago with the George W. Bush biopic W.) I have a feeling McKay saw W and thought Stone didn’t go hard enough on Bush’s administration. That could explain why the director characterizes Bush & Co. as a bunch of rubes being worked by Christian Bale’s Cheney. Bale goes gleefully Method here, and it’s kinda ironic to see Batman — pounds packed on and head shaved — working as the Joker of the GWB administration. He’s an agent of chaos who just wants to see the world — or, at least, the Middle East — burn.

Just as he did in The Big Short, McKay gives us an angry, occasionally dizzying takedown of white men who fucked up this country for regular folks. There’s even a mysterious, working-class family man (Jesse Plemons) to narrate the movie in a plainspoken, semi-condescending manner. Working from his own script, McKay balances being straightforward and satirical in chronicling Cheney’s life. He’s initially introduced as a drunken, lower-class, Wyoming-based fuckup who’s berated by his wife (Amy Adams, Bale’s sparring partner in David O. Russell movies) into doing something more with his life. 

Cut to Cheney working for future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (a caddish Steve Carell), who was then working under Nixon. It’s there that Cheney gets a taste of Washington politics — basically old white dudes dicking around, working on nothing but their authority. “What do we believe?” Cheney sincerely asks Rumsfeld, whose only response is to laugh heartily. Of course, once Cheney becomes VP decades later — after somehow suckering George W. (Sam Rockwell, hamming it the hell up) into a deal that gives him more power than vice presidents usually have — it becomes extremely difficult to gauge what this war-loving, heart-attack-prone sumbitch truly believes. 

With Vice, McKay does his own manic, disturbing version of All the King’s Men, with Cheney as his Willie Stark. Much like the ruthless central figure of Robert Penn Warren’s novel (and subsequent movie adaptations), McKay’s Cheney has spent most of his life being ambivalent about becoming a politician. But once he obtains elected office, the man goes batshit crazy with power.  

As much as McKay often takes the irreverent route in telling this story — doing everything from throwing in fourth-wall breaks to having Bale and Adams speak like villainous Shakespearean characters, and actually trying to end the movie midway through before Cheney gets that call from Bush’s camp — the moments of zaniness don’t make Cheney’s reign (of terror!) any less unsettling. McKay ultimately paints Cheney as a devious, unpredictable sociopath, leaving us more depressed than amused.

Once again, McKay — bless his Democratic socialist heart — wants us to get mad at inglorious bastards like Cheney, men who never have our best interests at heart and do more harm than good. Considering whom we currently have as president, dude didn’t have to go to such lengths to deliver that message.