According to Vice, Dick Cheney had no interest in George W. Bush’s offer of the vice presidency, an office with little authority and less power. He changes his mind after arriving at an “understanding” with the feckless presidential candidate. As writer-director Adam McKay tells it, the ambitious Cheney offers to assume the “mundane” responsibilities of the presidency, little things like foreign policy, energy and defense. Bush is visibly relieved that the burden will be lifted from his back.
As in his film about the 2008 financial meltdown, The Big Short, McKay wraps complicated history into a plausible, entertaining yarn with a snappy sense of timing. A half century of Cheney is amply covered in slightly over two hours with nary a dull moment or a beat missed. Although many details are imagined, Vice runs on the track laid by known facts. It’s a damning indictment.
As the story begins, Cheney is a drunken ne’er do well in the early 1960s, booted from Yale for poor grades, working as a lineman in Casper, Wyo. Christian Bale gives a head-turning performance as Cheney, eventually disappearing entirely into the corpulent white-haired eminence who attained the summit of power. Bale accurately mimics the commanding soullessness of the man’s voice. Like Darth Vader, whom he almost sounds like, Vice President Cheney never had to raise his voice to be heard.
Young Cheney’s fiancé, Lynne, played with strength and understanding by Amy Adams, turns him around, promising to boot him from her life if he doesn’t shape up. The child of an abusive marriage, Lynne won’t stand for what her mother endured. She’s also willing to be Lady Macbeth, blocked from rising by social norms but able to forge her husband into her ramp of ascent. They are partners in politics as well as in life.
If Vice is correct, one wonders what promise she saw in the weak material at hand. On his first day as a congressional aide in 1968, Cheney arrives with no party affiliation and becomes Republican at random. As lackey to congressman Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney tags along with him into the Nixon White House and is given a windowless closet with a desk, a phone and an empty in-box. It’s a start. With Rumsfeld as mentor, Cheney learns to handle the levers of power.
Vice is packed with supporting characters, none more prominent that Rumsfeld, played with ill-concealed arrogance by Steve Carell. Imagine his dismay when tables turn and Cheney is at the head. Bush (an affably bumbling Sam Rockwell) stumbles into the story during the ’80s, drunk at a Washington party. As the family’s black sheep, he appears to have no political future and yet, his elevation to the White House is only one of several unanticipated turns in recent history. McKay cuts from the main narrative to show the results of American policy, including bombs dropping on Cambodian civilians in 1970 and an Iraqi family in 2003.
Cheney may have come to Washington with no firm convictions but eventually coupled the quasi-libertarian notion of small government with an authoritarian understanding of presidential power. Too plodding on the campaign trail to win a presidential race, he would work through the man he helped elect. With Lynne’s coaching, Cheney plays populist while being bankrolled by the 1 percent. As vice president, he throws the henhouse doors open to the foxes of industry. Behind the boyish president’s bravado lurks a puppet master too boring to be noticed by a public fixated on “reality” TV. Padding through the corridors of power with ghostly stealth, Cheney changed the direction of America and the shape of the world, leaving a legacy that included subverting the norms of good government and public service in favor of corporate interests. He plans the Iraq invasion before 9/11.
However, Iraq was not the success story imagined by Cheney, Rumsfeld and associates. Vice alludes to—but doesn’t explore—how Cheney’s power slipped during Bush’s final years. Apparently, the “understanding” with Bush was broken by failure. Vice concedes that Cheney was a decent family man, but depicts his public career as unredeemable.
