VICE - Review

VICE

Academy award winner Christian Bale and Amy Adams, along with Director Adam McKay whose 2015 film “The Big short” smartly chronicled the events leading up to the 2008 housing crash and economic recession, dabbles again into the world of reality by telling the story of Dick Cheney. 

From his youthful ne'er-do-well days in Casper, WY noted with being arrested multiple times for drunk driving, perpetual drunkenness and flunking out of Yale University and working as a laborer power lineman to his eventual ascendancy to becoming President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, Wyoming sole congressman for 10 years to becoming the most influential and powerful Vice President in US history in the film “VICE”.  A solid epic story about how a naïve unsophisticated intern evolved into the ultimate bureaucratic Washington insider reshaping the country bit by bit for over four decades and the globe in ways that we still feel today.

REVIEW: First, everyone should see this film. Whether your opinion of Dick Cheney as a patriot or a villain; famous or infamous, the story of his life is beyond anything imaginable if you did not know some of the events about the man already. And if that was enough to draw your appetite inward, I am here to bear full witness to one irrefutable fact. If the credits in the film had said at the end of “Vice” Dick Cheney played by Dick Cheney you would be hard pressed to think or say otherwise as Christian Bale’s performance was beyond brilliant. One of the five best performances I have seen in my entire life.

Bale’s doesn’t just inhabit Dick Cheney he snatches his skin, his soul and his mind to wearing it as the breathing incarnate of the former Vice President. He’s better at being Dick Cheney than the real one. And he does more than just sound like him, he walks like him, he sneers like him and he also even showed a loving and tender side of him in what I believe is probably true as the devoted husband to his wife Lynn (Adams) and two daughters Liz and Mary. But it is Bales extra effort to personalized the more secretive aspects of Cheney life (real or imagine) that makes the portrayal of him feel more fully realized. Bale’s puts a lot humanistic marrow in the man’s old bones than we have seen or read about given his real life reputation for privacy, coldness and aloofness.

“Vice” is a straight drama with small portions of satire and strategic moments of humor. But ultimately the film is a revisit chronologically of Cheney’s entire life from his early drinking days to his first’s serious attempt in 1969 at having a professional life as intern on Capitol Hill working in Congressman William A. Steiger during the Richard Nixon Administration. He then joined the staff of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969 to 1970. It’s this early short window of his life where (if you believe the film) that Cheney discovered that politics was a necessary pathway means to power. Or as he believed in the “Unitary Executive Theory” aka a theory of American constitutional law holding that the President possesses the power to control everything in a Machiavellian way through any means sneakiness, cunning, and or lacking accepted standards of moral code.

Through all of his way too many heart attacks, his shooting a friend in the face, his designs on having a VP office in every Cabinet agency and even his eventual hearty transplant, what even more fascinating about Cheney's life in “Vice” was how many eventually famous people intersected in his early life as an intern from 1969 to 1974 that in large measure clearly shaped his designs on securing the power he later achieved and used from 2000 - 2008. 

Besides the random meeting of Donald Rumsfeld, there were chance meetings of eventual lifelong friend of a young lawyer named Antonin Scalia who later sat on the Supreme Court. A young lobbyist trying to change FCC laws who went on to create Fox news named Roger Ailes. A young wealthy set of brothers looking to use their new wealth in politics in David Koch and Charles Koch. A small but fast growing beer brewer entrepreneur named Adolph Coors Jr, and the seemingly always drunken oldest son of  the then Vice President in the 1980's named George W. Bush. 

The entire film is solid all around with some very fine supporting performances including Steve Carell as the mercurial Rumsfeld, Tyler Perry playing the cautious General Colin Powell and a lighthearted but effective portrayal of G.W. Bush by Sam Rockwell. But the real and only reason to see “Vice” is what Christian Bales delivers in his central character Cheney which occupies almost 100% of the 2:12 minutes running time. I am was left speechless to offering any additional superlatives about the idiosyncrasy of Bale’s work here. He should and will probably be nominated for Best Actor, but there is very little chance he will win given that most voters for the award in Hollywood probably have absolute contempt and incredulous disdain for the real life Cheney.

In the end while the story “Vice” is always thought provoking from beginning to end, the only thing that holds this film back from any serious Oscar consideration is the screenplay which gets clunky here and there in its execution. Still that’s no excuse or reason at all to take a pass on this truly fascinating film.

  

3.25 Stars