Vice: Cheyn Of Ghouls

--Written by Guest Reviewer Kyle Delaney

It's September 11th, 2001. The scene is the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, an apocalypse-proof bunker untold stories beneath the White House. Alarm sirens are blaring. The confused cross-talk is maddeningly cacophonous. Televisions are cycling through horrific scenes. The second plane has already slammed into the South Tower. No, now the South Tower has fallen. The room is full of ice chewing psychopaths in their own right who've figuratively, or perhaps literally, stabbed colleagues and friends to reach the heights of power they now occupy. One-by-one they're losing their shit over something called the Rules of Engagement before ultimately, inevitably, gladly turning toward and conceding their authority to a stoic sixty-year-old with the physical appearance of the Penguin and the gravelly snarl of Christian Bale's Batman who resolutely, almost pleasantly, decides it's chill to shoot down passenger jets full of innocent people in American airspace. This is the bloodless demeanor of a man who is doing 9/11 and knows he's doing 9/11 well.

It's also your formal introduction to the titular protagonist of Adam McKay's Vice, then-Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale, who is looking cut and sexy as hell throughout the film). Over the next two-plus hours, as we navigate his multi-decade ascent from Midwestern chud hell-bent on setting the world record for DUIs accrued over one human lifespan into his more recognizable form as supreme architect and prime mover of disastrous policies during the worst presidency in American history, we become accustomed to watching him bowl over careerist bureaucrats for whom cabinet appointments, advisory gigs or elected office are but the natural culmination of a life's hard work and dedicated service. Each of them are eventually hamstrung in their quest for influence by some limitation or another: fear of responsibility, fear of failure, fear of being remembered by history as a war criminal. This is the vacuum into which Dick Cheney steps time and time again in a pursuit of power so classic and timeless it'd almost be charming were it not for the horrors it ultimately precipitates, images of which flash across the screen in a timely manner like fits of shared PTSD from our repressed national memory.

With Vice, McKay has essentially conjured Shakespeare's Macbeth, calibrated for a society that thinks reading Shakespeare is lame as shit (an acknowledgement that's made explicit when Dick and Lynne Cheney share a steamy Elizabethan dialogue during one of the many comedic breaks McKay employs to shake the narrative from the moldy spell of the modern biopic). The film is largely successful as political critique because it sticks to established fact and eschews the customary, rote partisan rhetoric of our cursed time in favor of grander themes, thus operating on a frequency many Americans will perceive as apolitical. McKay plays the hits, to be sure, but he doesn't take any cheap shots and, if anything, is unnecessarily gracious in his retelling of events. The players, known and notorious as they may be, are fairly rendered here. Sam Rockwell's portrayal of George W. Bush, especially, strays from popular convention, depicting not so much the big-eared hopeless buffoon of our popular imagination (or the film's trailer), but rather a failson fuckup whose daddy issues are leveraged against his judgement by a more bloodthirsty and profit-hungry inner circle. In the film's most impactful moment, he addresses the American people as Baghdad is carpet bombed. His leg shakes beneath his desk, presumably grasping the godlike capacity of his office and, unlike his Vice, shying from its implications.

For his part, Cheney arrives at his political awakening not by reading books or position papers, but instead by identifying with what can only be considered a 1970s variant strain of big dick energy exuded by then congressional representative Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell, who by film's end is truly unrecognizable beneath some stellar makeup work). In a subsequent scene deliberating the ethics of vaporizing poor brown rice farmers half a world away, he asks his mentor, "What, exactly, do we believe?" Rumsfeld responds by laughing in his damn face. The message is clear: the power is the point, who dies or why shall remain to be determined. The most telling scene in the film comes shortly thereafter when Cheney is upgraded to a windowless office in the bowels of Nixon's West Wing and is overcome by emotion immediately recognizable as the same one exhibited by every guy who ever clawed his way to a GED and then washed out of society before being issued a badge and a gun by his local municipal government at age thirty. It's his first taste of pride, and power, and authority. And all at once. A single sip is just not gonna suffice. The career trajectory of the 21st century's own Dr. Strangelove is henceforth cast.

Vice is McKay's second crack at litigating the weighty hellscape of the aughts, following on the heels of 2016's The Big Short - a solid and enjoyable flick about how some Wall Street dipshits deserve to profit off the immiseration of regular schumcks like you and I, while others do not. His latest effort to make a dishwater-ass-looking motherfucker like Dick Cheney a compelling figure features many of the same bells and whistles he employed to make default swaps and derivatives intelligible to people with 620 credit scores. Clever narrative techniques, tangential and oft-comical asides serving to 'splain the more technical plot points or character motivations. It's all here, and the results are pretty decidedly mixed. Where The Big Short introduced a steady stream of soliloquies and celebrity cameos intended to demystify complex financial instruments, the devices employed in Vice are less frequent, conducted more haphazardly, and are absent of any common motif. For every successful gag - such as the fake credits that roll before the fateful third act - there are one or two mini-lectures on some element of unitary executive theory that come across as unfocused and flat. Given how much simpler comedic undertakings - repeatedly trolling the liberal audience by having Cheney suffer something like 20 heart attacks over the movie's runtime, for instance - achieve the same disarming effect, it's difficult to say whether the hits are worth the misses in this regard.

Despite the unnecessary gimmicks, the at times overly expository narration, and the frenetic pacing that manages to muddle what should be a simple and direct extrapolation from the Bush and Cheney years to our cruel and unusual present, the writing is ultimately too good and the cast too talented not to win over the viewer. All reservations are eventually diffused, if only through attrition. And that's right when McKay yanks the lure. Feeling warm and fuzzy watching Cheney console his daughter after she confides to her parents that's she's gay? Think at his core the old bastard's actually an alright guy for sticking by her even as Bush pushed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage? Cool, because after that you get to watch him sell her out for maybe the most inconsequential gain in American electoral politics: a fucking WYOMING HOUSE SEAT! You then watch as Iraq unravels and descends into sectarian bloodshed and pointless violence. Cheney covers his ass by shitcanning his sensei as he cowers on the phone in an unmarked Pentagon storage closet. He almost dies from yet another heart scare. At his lowest point, he's lustily booed by a stadium full of Nationals fans. He's collecting L's at a breakneck pace and you've turned on him even before he confirms to Martha Radditz that yes, the wanton violence and torture and kidnapping and chaos unleashed on an undeserving and innocent people was worth it. You're booing him, yourself. You're throwing your popcorn. Fuck, this guy really sucks!!

Cheney then turns left from the interview chair, breaks the fourth wall, and in a style that's too Frank Underwood not to notice or be creeped out by, implicates the viewer for what has, until this, the closing moments of the film, indeed felt conspicuously absent: their complicity. Almost nothing in Vice conveys the kind of gnashing vitriol and desire for blind, broad-scale vengeance that was ubiquitous in the wake of September 11th. We've been allowed to forget, to convince ourselves it never happened or, even if it did, at least it wasn't us. That is until Cheney, in an invigorated growl that lands like a clean right hand on our outstretched chins, reminds us of the painful truth that we chose him (twice, actually!) It's jarring and terrifying. Yet, when he continues on about how easy it is to judge him now, how the evil people who want to do us harm are still out there, and how he doesn't regret for one second taking every step necessary to keep American families safe, you kind of start to lose him. The words, and even by this point, the conviction with which they're recited are as familiar as any psalm you've heard a hundred times or more. But you also know the score. And you wonder whether killing another million women and children will finally make us safe?

George HW Bush once said that 9/11 made Dick Cheney crazy, just pushed him off the deep end. And maybe it did. It would certainly be the most relatable and humanizing thing about him. For his many faults, Cheney is at least on the record, which is more than can be said for you or I or our uncles who, in 2005, definitely said we should just nuke Fallujah and Mosul, but denies it now. To borrow a phrase: Dick Cheney didn't change, the times did. We did. By electing in 2008 the one candidate who was too young to have been able to vote for the Iraq War, and 8 years later Cheney's conflict had definitely not expanded into Libya, and Syria, and Yemen. Vice reminds us what Americans are capable of when we come together as one nation, portraying something deeper and more damning than we expect at the box office window.

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