REVIEW

VICE, appropriately named, tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.

The film, which is written by Adam McKay, makes no secret of his own motivational objective. It stems from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising given his bias which runs from the first minute of this film to the last.

Whether you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet is another question entirely. For pure malignancy, Vice makes the present incumbent of the White House look like Forrest Gump. But it must be said he presents it very entertainingly.

Film critics would have noted that McKay deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. He delivers jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to the camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, only to be revealed in a late here-I-am kind of flourish.

It’s almost as if the director, and his editor, Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wholly wrong to categorise them as one-trick ponies; they have dozens of production tricks.

If the viewer can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award for his remarkable lead performances. He renders himself almost unrecognisable and nails Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.

Gary Oldman won the Academy Award last year for his role as Winston Churchill, but he didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale does Cheney (both physically and temperamentally).

As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

In the years since her breakthrough movie in 2002, Catch Me If You Can, Adams has acquired the acting adroitness in playing Lynne Cheney who is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to local folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.

How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit”, is the film’s narrative.

IT BEGINS in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.

They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). One of the fascinations of this film is the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.

After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the more shrewder and Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs the highest – with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a rather ludicrous – if not hilarious – scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.

Cheney’s appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever and astute enough never to look or give the image of being greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated) invites him to become his running mate – “a nothing job,” snorts Lynne – he plays hard to get. He insists he’s happy running an oil company.

Eventually, he says he’ll do it on the proviso that he takes some of the more “mundane” jobs such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy. McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.

Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He even has the pretence to turn the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.

McKay’ political bias is adept enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: “I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.”

I doubt it will come as no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice when the Oscar nominees gather in Hollywood, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release in December, to see the film flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.

The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is an emphatic no.

Verdict: Left-leaning political bias, but well delivered.

★★★★