“Vice” is an unusual, uneven biopic of Dick Cheney

By A.D.M.

MIDWAY THROUGH “Vice”, George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell) asks Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) to be his presidential running-mate. That evening, as he performs his nightly ablutions, Cheney relays the offer to his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), in their bathroom. “What,” ponders the narrator of Adam McKay’s biopic, does Cheney “really want?” The trouble is, “We can’t just drop into a Shakespearean soliloquy that dramatises every feeling and motivation.” Whereupon, we do, sort of: in the next scene the Cheneys discuss their feelings and motivations in mock-Shakespearean verse. The moment encapsulates the considerable strengths of Mr McKay’s film, and its related drawbacks.

One big strength is the quality of the acting. From the tank-like gait to his mostly impassive features, Mr Bale’s impersonation of the former vice-president is superb. As Bush—first encountered as he stumbles drunkenly around a congressional reception—Mr Rockwell is folksily convincing. What Steve Carell’s Donald Rumsfeld lacks in verisimilitude he makes up for in scene-stealing entertainment value. Ms Adams’s turn is the best of the lot. Whoever Lynne Cheney married would have ended up in the White House, according to her high-school classmates, an appraisal that Ms Adams makes credible.

Then there is the formal daring that the burst of Shakespeare epitomises. Mr McKay also employs fake end credits (after the movie imagines Cheney retiring from politics before he teams up with Bush), real and fake archive footage, and a scene in a restaurant in which a waiter offers the veep and his cronies a menu that includes extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo Bay. All that, plus the enigmatic narrator. As he did for the financial crisis in “The Big Short” (2015), Mr McKay uses these techniques to leaven his grave, sometimes technical, subject matter. At a showing in London he explained that he hadn’t wanted to make a “dusty biopic”. He hasn’t. It’s a riot.

Yet that strength is also a flaw. The air of absurdism may fit the skewed reality the movie evokes, in which epic power is vested in deficient individuals. But the zaniness also suggests a lack of confidence—in Mr McKay’s audience. Roger Ailes, one-time boss of Fox News, gets a cameo in the film, and it caters to the overstimulated mediaverse he helped to create, in which short attention spans require constant jolts. The tonal shifts these highjinks entail—from earnestness to satire and back again—sometimes jar in a film that, in its depictions of war in Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq, also insists on a life-and-death moral seriousness.

“It felt like the book of history was closing on Dick Cheney,” Mr McKay said in London. And, these days, the Bush-Cheney era is sometimes subject to the misty revisionism that comparisons with contemporary American politics can involve. For some, it has come to seem a time of at least minimal competence and decorum in government. “Vice” is meant as a corrective. In Mr McKay’s telling, Cheney bestrides the world, and wrecks it. He meddles with the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, permits torture (“If the US does it, it can’t be torture”) and develops a dangerously expansive concept of executive power.

“How did you become such a cold son-of-a-bitch?” Rumsfeld asks him. But the film doesn’t offer an answer—as the Shakespeare sequence slyly acknowledges. Mr McKay’s Cheney has his nuances, even virtues. He is stoic about his heart attacks. He is a loving father, who reassures his younger daughter, Mary, when she comes out as a lesbian (“It doesn’t matter sweetheart, we love you no matter what”). But from the audience’s first encounter with him, boozy and brawling in Wyoming in 1963 after being chucked out of Yale (“a big fat piss-soaked zero”, as Lynne puts it), to his supremacy after 9/11, what drives him is elusive. The film mentions Halliburton, the oil-services firm of which he was CEO, and the contracts it won in post-war Iraq, but it doesn’t dwell on them. Cheney believes in projecting power, his own and America’s, but even those convictions are only hinted at.

Retelling recent history—the kind in which most of the people involved are still alive—carries a certain queasy delicacy. Mr McKay’s decision not to attribute motives to his subject is journalistically honest but a glitch in his ambitious storytelling. The closest he comes is in Dick’s desire to live up to Lynne’s expectations, which those sub-“Macbeth” pentameters both send up and underline. One of this raucous film’s quirks, in the end, is that what purports to be a study in power succeeds most as a portrait of a marriage.