Vice (Dir Adam McKay, 2 h 12 m)

 

At the heart of Adam McKay's bizarrely gonzo biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney is undoubtedly the man himself. If nothing else, in a film that flows between perfect biopic and off-kilter quasi-essay about the nature of power in the late 20th and early 21st Century American politics, in one of his best roles to date, Christian Bale skewers the at-once powerful and anonymous figure of Cheney, as a figure of ultimate power, at once monstrous and sympathetic. Whilst the film around him is a patchwork quilt of mixed performances, tone, and indeed reliability of narrative, McKay perfectly places Cheney as a Machiavellian figure, a figure who changed the American and global landscape forever , and a man who sowed the seeds of modern America's political environment.

This film's centre is the narrative rise and fall and rise again of Cheney as a man and a political animal-although the film proper begins with the events of 9/11, the moment, arguably in which Cheney took the reins of power for himself which instigated everything from the War On Terror to the erosion of the rights of American citizens to the rise of ISIS, and which seems like the culmination of all his planning by the time the film returns to this point. From here, the film goes back to the beginning of Cheney's career, beginning with his dropping out of Yale due to his alcoholism, and subsequent arrest when drink driving-a sequence, along with the older Cheney's flyfishing, that the film returns to time and again-leading to his wife, Lynne, (a steely-determined Amy Adams), giving him an ultimatum-stop drinking or lose her. Pulling himself up, Cheney quickly joins the ranks of the White House interns, under Donald Rumsfeld (played to perfection by Steve Carrell, who keeps his performance on a nigh constant knife-edge of comic and calculating), but heads back to the private sector post Nixon posting Rumsfeld to Brussels, only to return to politics under the Ford administration.

After Ford's defeat, so Cheney attempts to reach Congress, having the first of several heart attacks post-a painfully bad campaign speech, with his wife taking over and successfully managing his campaign to victory, with a quick montage showing Cheney's support of conservative and pro-business policies, quickly followed by his work in the ever more conservative White House as Secretary of Defence under Bush Snr. However, despite the fantastic amount of power that Cheney has, his ambitions of higher power beyond that are thwarted by the public scrutiny his gay daughter Mary would likely face if he were to seek the Presidency, and the film seemingly ends, complete with credits roll, with Cheney as CEO of Haliburton, having retired from politics

Alongside this first half of the film, narrated by Kurt, a factious veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, (Jesse Plemons), we are given an interwoven narrative of the ever-changing political world around Cheney, the rise of Fox News, of the Republican Party's inevitable slide towards a plutocratic, religiously Conservative Republican Party, a whistlestop tour through figures that now dominate our political landscape, or who overshadow it, and even, in a scene that is as chilling as it is brief, an echo, through Reagan's speech to the GOP, of the words that now dominate the imagination of the GOP: "Make America Great Again". 

 Cheney's political retirement is, however, curtailed by a sudden call from George W Bush, who wants Cheney to be his vice president. Though Cheney is initially hesitant, trying to find a more suitable alternative, after a memorable meeting with the decidedly green younger Bush, he eventually, through Bush's wish to be hands-off in various areas of power, and armed with a piece of legislature laid out by Kurt via narration, known as the Unitary Executive Theory-in short, that the President, and via Cheney's lawyer, Addington, the Vice President holds overall power, his decisions cannot be wrong, and that he has the power to make decisions on his own-agrees to be Bush's running mate, and following Bush's controversial victory, his vice President. 

From here, in the period pre and post 9/11, Cheney's grip on power is already ironclad, with Cheney practically everywhere, both through his offices in various departments, and in the veritable army of Cheney supporters and associates across the state departments, to essentially keep the hapless Bush (ably played as a bumbling but well meaning idiot by Sam Rockwell), out of the loop, as well as the various thinktanks and organisations which Cheney mechanises into action. In one memorable scene, we get another stark reminder of how Cheney's actions affected American politics, with focus group testing leading to a stark change in the very fabric and language in which American policy is expressed, and in a chilling extension of this scene, how it is expressed across America Media.

Following the events of September 11, and the movement of America towards a war with Afghanistan and Iraq, the film is, in essence, a high-speed trek through the rest of the Bush regime, as Cheney obtains more and more power, through the invasion of Iraq, leading to every horror from Guantanamo Bay to Extraordinary rendition, even after his former mentor, Rumsfeld is forced from his position as Secretary of Defence, till his power is practically absolute, and it becomes clear that he, rather than Bush, who becomes increasingly visually sidelined, barely appearing in the last third of the film, is calling the shots. 

From here, the film shows, once again, Cheney returning to the political sidelines, before, with heart failure, he receives a transplant from a most unlikely place, with the narrative link between the Machiavellian monster, and Kurt, emblematic of the men that Cheney's roughshod approach to foreign policy affected brought, perhaps too smoothly for its own good, together. The final sting in the tale is thus the continuation of Cheney's political life, via his daughter, at the cost of the relationship with his younger daughter, who, by working against gay marriage, he essentially betrays.

Mixed with this is a startlingly odd form of story-telling. In another director's hands, this could have been a much more straightforward, and more thematically consistent, if less interesting film. In McKay's, Cheney's narrative pings back and forth across the pinball table, colliding with elements out of a video essay, a SNL sketch, a straight documentary, a farce, and a quasi-Shakespearean take on a villainous man, driven by duty to his country, and eventually undone by it. Cheney's final speech, direct to camera, is Bale's single best moment, the moment in which, alone, he confronts the audience, lays bare his very reason d'etre in a piece to camera that is nothing short of a soliloquy, a confession. Cheney is a monster created by and for America-a man who wields power for the safety of its people, despite how much it erodes their rights.

Indeed, for a film that catches the minutiae, the grain, the look of each decade Cheney lives through, it is so reliant on fourth wall breaks, in showing how fractured it is, how easily its narrative flows between Cheney and the people, and media around him, that they cease to become effective. In fact, despite this film being nominated for an Oscar for editing, it's a choppy mess, flitting distractedly between scenes, tortured visual metaphors-most notably in the fish that Cheney creates lures for, and the balanced teacups-and its insistent documentary (or mockumentary)-style, blending the real and imagined, footage and recreation. A smarter leaner edit of this would have drawn parallels between the growing background hum of rolling news, including Fox, the cutting becoming quicker and quicker, more edits and back-and-forth cutting between scenes, but McKay's film is too fractured, too experimental to keep itself to one visual or editing style for long.

Even the casting is inconsistent-Bale, Carrell, Adams and Rockwell are perfect castings, with Carrell, alongside Bale having an almost uncanny ability to become Rumsfeld, but elsewhere, the casting seems better suited to a comedic, rather than dramatic take on these themes-Kurt, for his part is a wasted character, restricted to narrator except when the film needs to talk about the War in Iraq, and his dramatic tie to Cheney is lazy and arguably manipulative storytelling. Vice is, at best, a story that manages to come across in spite of its unfocused, rambling, gonzo style, rather than because of it.

And yet, McKay manages, despite this, despite all the visual and narrative chaff, to bring across one key message. Cheney won. And the man who now sits in the White House, a figure whose shadow falls across the final scenes of the film, despite his non-appearance and his name never being spoken, is a product of his Machiavellian schemes, his erosion and bending of truth and love of absolute power in the president. If Cheney is a monster, he is as much a Doctor Frankenstein, a creator of monsters that now roam the American political landscape-and this McKay and Bale capture perfectly, in a way few films about this period have before.

Rating: Recommended