Vice

Vice 2019

Written and directed by Adam McKay. In a 15 year career this guy has been busy. He has 29 and 34 writing and directing credits on IMDB respectively including Anchorman 1 and 2, The Other Guys and The Big Short, along with over 100 production credits. That’s a serious amount of work. There are directors out there that have worked twice as long with a smaller body of work than that.

We follow Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) though his adult life from 1963 where he’s a lineman in Wyoming, struggling to control his drinking, through his rise to power in the republican party which culminates in him being the Vice President to George Bush Junior to beyond the 9/11 attacks.

Whatever you think of Christian Bale as a person, you know he’ll throw himself into a role and Vice is no different. He gains 45 pounds throughout the filming. That, along with the help of prosthetic make-up, result in remarkable physical similarities between himself and Cheney. I don’t know much of the man himself and his mannerisms (and that’s part of the films appeal for me ) but apparently he had that pretty close to the mark too. He will probably get an Oscar nomination for this role. Amy Adams plays Lynne Cheney and does a solid enough job along with Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. Sam Rockwell was great as George Bush Junior and he stole every scene he was in.

With that cast, an (at times) hard hitting, (other times) satirical and nearly always sharp script, I felt it should have been a bit better than it was.

While I enjoyed the film, and was more then a little bit sad about how easily this man seemed to sway everyone and everything to his own agenda, I will always have issues with such a one-sided portrayal. I have no love for the republican party but films this politically skewed (in any direction) always make me wary. There are some points of the film that I assume have to be factual, as there would be lawsuits a plenty if they weren’t, but the scenes where there are just politicians sitting and talking I don’t see how there is any proof of what was said and satire was used to fill in the gaps. I can see how this could be taken as a Liberal jab at a politician who left office with an approval rating at a staggeringly low 13%.

There is one shot in the film that stands above the rest. Bush has just won the 2000 election, the Oval office is in darkness, the door opens and we see Cheney’s silhouette. It very much had a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” look to it. Brilliant cinematography!

All in all I enjoyed the film and the performances are worth going to see regardless of your political leanings