Bale disappears into the performance and he deserves any and all award nominations he’s likely to receive for this role.
Before 2015, Adam McKay was best known for directing Will Farrell comedies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. After he co-wrote and directed The Big Short, a brilliantly conceived chronicle of the events leading up to the 2007 economic crisis, his involvement in a biographical film about Dick Cheney, one of the most polarizing and enigmatic figures in U. S. politics, is less of a surprise.
Vice is that look at Cheney’s life leading up to and including his stint as Vice President under George W. Bush. The title is something of a double entendre. Of course, it refers to Cheney’s tenure as VP but it also refers to his personal vice: an insatiable hunger for power.
Picking up in 1963, we first meet Cheney (Christian Bale) after he’s failed out of Yale for excessive partying. He’s now stringing power lines in Wyoming and living with his girlfriend, Lynne (Amy Adams) and her mother. By Lynne’s definition, he is a loser. After he gets his second DUI, she challenges him to change his ways or she will leave him. We next see Cheney as a Congressional intern in 1969, where he lands in the office of Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), then an economic advisor to President Richard Nixon.
Vice then documents the calculated strategy and good fortune that leads Cheney to serve as the White House Chief of Staff under President Ford, a Wyoming Congressman during the Reagan years, and as Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush.
However, the movie hits its stride after Cheney receives a phone call from George W. Bush (an excellent Sam Rockwell) who offers him the chance to become his Presidential running mate. The inexperienced Bush doesn’t have the killer instinct or the political pedigree that Cheney has. After negotiating unprecedented decision-making power be added to the role of Vice President under Bush, Cheney accepts the job. Once Bush eventually wins the contested 2000 election, Cheney leverages that power to influence multiple levels of the government. The attacks of 9/11 allow Cheney even more opportunities to influence domestic and foreign policy and McKay asserts that the effects of those policies are reverberating throughout Washington today.
As described, Vice might sound like a droll reenactment of Cheney’s life. Through McKay’s eyes, everything is filtered through a layer of dark, satirical humor. Christian Bale’s performance, including a whisper-like rasp of a voice and the physical transformation to play the much-heavier Cheney, gives the character a contemplative aura that belies his ruthlessness. Bale disappears into the performance and he deserves any and all award nominations he’s likely to receive for this role.
Unfortunately, McKay’s script doesn’t live up to Bale’s breathtaking performance. He takes a lot of swings at Cheney’s moral compass and hunger for power, but never lands any solid punches. Not because Cheney didn’t do some undeniably terrible things but because the impact of these deeds are snuffed out by McKay’s attempts to get clever with his filmmaking rather than concise with the story. Admittedly, McKay concedes in on-screen text that documenting events in the life of the secretive Cheney is a bit of a challenge but doing a scene in Shakespearean verse does little to help the situation.
McKay tries to use The Big Short as a template for telling a multi-layered and potentially confusing story in an easy-to-digest way. Had the film focused on a specific era of Cheney’s political career, that approach might have been more effective. As it stands, Vice wants us to walk out of the theater thinking seriously about a subject it portrays in a darkly humorous way. It just doesn’t work.
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
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