The current popular vote loser and Electoral College winner is a traitor, and a disgrace who has made us appreciate the baseline competence of the previous popular vote loser and Electoral College winner, one George W. Bush.
We should not forget, however, that Bush was rightly called, as recently as 2016, the worst president ever. And part of the reason for his awfulness was his vice-president, Dick Cheney.
Maybe Bush could have been an amiable, harmless president. Or maybe someone other than Cheney would have taken advantage of the Bush leadership vacuum to become puppet master.
Even so, the idea of making a movie about Dick Cheney is not one that would have occurred to most people. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me. Then again, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make a movie about the Wall Street mortgage meltdown either.
Adam McKay made The Big Short back in 2015 with Christian Bale and Steve Carrell. Now he’s made Vice, a movie about Dick Cheney, also with Christian Bale and Steve Carrell, and put it out on BluRay and DVD.
I remember seeing ads for Vice months ago. It didn’t catch my attention. I think I assumed it was a cop movie, something about a vice squad. Given that W. with Josh Brolin came out in 2008, we might wonder if we really need another movie about the era of the Bush administration? We actually do.
I give Vice ★★★★☆, plus maybe a half star.
The movie starts out with Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) as a drinking, brawling ne’er-do-well college dropout in 1963 Wyoming. A dirtbag, in modern parlance, according to the movie’s narrator.
Cheney gets pulled over for drunk driving. Then the movie cuts ahead to September 11, 2001. Most everyone in the situation room is apprehensive. But Vice President Dick Cheney is calm.
The narrator tells us that at that moment, Cheney saw an opportunity to become, for all practical purposes, the president, while keeping Bush as a convenient figurehead.
The narrator is a warehouse worker later turned soldier. You might wonder what his relationship to Dick Cheney is. If I told you that, it might almost constitute a genuine spoiler.
This movie is a fictionalized account of history. We know the broad strokes of this story, but a lot of the dialogue and the smaller details had to be invented. A title card near the beginning admits as much.
But it all strikes me as very plausible. Even the more absurd moments that obviously didn’t happen as the movie depicts them still convey the truth of this is what it must have felt like, I think.
The movie jumps back to 1963. Lynne is determined to not become her mother, meekly waiting for a drunk, abusive husband to come home. Dick must make something of himself, or else Lynne will leave him for a man with ambition and purpose.
Steve Carrell wouldn’t have been my first choice to play Donald Rumsfeld. But I have to acknowledge that he is brilliant at inhabiting practically any rôle you give him to play, though not as much as Christian Bale.
With this Rumsfeld, you’re very much aware that it is Steve Carrell playing Rumsfeld. But with Cheney, it’s quite easy to forget about the actor who has played Batman and Irving Rosenfeld.
Cheney doesn’t even know he’s a Republican until he hears Rumsfeld speak. Cheney has decided to become an intern at the U. S. House of Representatives, and a fellow intern from Wisconsin wants to be assigned to a Democrat. That’s just fine by Cheney.
Rumsfeld is aware of Cheney’s DWIs, and is willing to hold them over Cheney, as he takes the young man under his wing.
Cheney goes on to run for Congress. But he’s got no charisma whatsoever, and would probably get more interest reciting digits of π than talking about his positions on the issues.
Luckily for him, and unluckily for us, Cheney suffers a cardiac event and Lynne starts campaigning for him in his place. The crowds hang on to her every word.
Thus Lynne emerges as an unexpectedly and paradoxically subversive figure. She accepts that she can’t go to Yale, head up a company, or run for mayor. Not to even mention running for president.
But she’s got a natural talent for campaigning on the regressive, misogynist Republican platform. Women should stay at home, raising the kids and cooking dinner, venturing outside only when their husbands need them to.
Dick Cheney returns to Washington as the congressman from Wyoming, and quickly gets to work voting against commonsense gun regulation, against making MLK Day a federal holiday, against protecting the environment, etc.
Perhaps the most valid criticism of this movie is that it completely skips over the first Gulf War, when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense. The Cheney apologists criticizing this movie would have you believe that Cheney was very well-respected for his handling of the first Gulf War.
And yet, internal polling for potential presidential candidates had Cheney polling below Dan Quayle. Remember Quayle? Remember when spelling skills were considered essential for presidential candidates?
Some have criticized the movie for making Cheney seem like a monster devoid of humanity. I disagree with that assessment.
I think this movie shows Cheney with a baseline of humanity: he loves his wife and he loves his daughters, but anyone else might very well deserve to get shot in the face, as far as he’s concerned.
Vice is rated R “for language and some violent images” by the MPAA. The heart transplant scene might induce nightmares in teenagers and maybe even adults.
The feature runs a bit more than two hours, and the DVD includes deleted scenes, 17 minutes’ worth. I don’t think including these would have changed the MPAA rating, but it does make me think the first cut of this movie was probably four hours.
About ten minutes’ worth of deleted scenes are refashioned into a short film about Lynne’s last year of high school.
She is a baton twirler in love with the star quarterback… not Dick Cheney, who is on the team but is apparently somewhat of a screw-up whose head isn’t in the game.
Lynne gets dumped and settles for Dick, and helps him get into Yale. Meanwhile, at home, Lynne watches her mother helplessly put up with her drunk father.
This is all exposition that the director correctly realized could be dispatched with a little bit of narration at the beginning of the movie. However, I do wish there had been just a little bit more about Lynne’s ambition to be a writer in the final cut.
Cutting the musical number is probably Adam McKay’s biggest regret. Of course he’s glad he gets to include it as a special feature on the DVD. There is also a deleted scene in which Cheney and Rumsfeld go to an underground bunker for a top secret military exercise.
I have often criticized biopics in which the writer doesn’t consult the subject or their family. But in the case of Vice, McKay gets a pass. If he had asked, he would probably have gotten a “Go f--- yourself” response at best.
It’s not a spoiler to tell you that Dick Cheney’s daughters have yet to reconcile. If you start to type “Have Liz Cheney and” into Google, it will immediately know what you’re about to ask.
Liz Cheney’s political opportunism led her to take the so-called “traditional” view of marriage and refuse to acknowledge Mary Cheney’s marriage to a woman.
Mary Cheney probably saw this coming, so it’s doubtful she would have broken down crying when she saw her sister on TV speaking out against gay marriage. I don’t doubt it hurt her emotionally. And I don’t doubt that Dick Cheney loves his daughters through all this.
We can quibble over just about any detail in Vice. For example, there is a scene in 2000 in which we see a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan wearing a Buccaneers jersey with a Nike logo on it. Completely invalidates the whole movie, huh?
Sure that Vice gets more important details wrong. It is overall a truthful, frightening and timely movie. And I hope our democracy survives long enough for McKay to make a movie about the horrors we’re living through right now.