REMARKABLE MAKEUP CAMOUFLAGES DISAPPOINTING FILM

Christian Bales as Dick Cheney in 'Vice'.

By Dominique Paul Noth

“Vice” admits openly and actually makes a joke about being a liberal’s viewpoint on the life of Dick Cheney.  But even its moments of levity and flippancy – Cheney’s rise to power as a board game, the theory of the unitary executive’s right to torture explained as a restaurant menu, Lynne and Dick Cheney breaking out in a Shakespearean bed scene in case we didn’t catch their similarity to the Macbeths, how his new heart plays a role in the script – don’t make this a comedy.

It lives instead  in-between – an ineffective domestic drama and a not quite social comedy, perhaps to make palatable a swift thumbnail rush through some four decades of American politics. 

Director Adam McKay has created an interesting but hardly great movie with some very good side-role acting – Steven Carell as self-mocking Donald Rumsfeld – and some great makeup artistry, led by Christian Bales’ transformation into Cheney. 

The actor scores with a pinpoint accurate monotone delivery, a sly sideways look and a portly imposing walk through 40 years of changing situations. But Bales is right – if he wins acting awards for his fine work, half should go to the squad of makeup specialists helping the actor find a way into the unassuming, unyielding bureaucrat’s rise to supreme power.

The actual Dick Cheney 

The film never answers key questions about Cheney, except to give wife Lynne extraordinary power over shaping him. And here there is some fierce acting by Amy Adams, who cajoles and controls her husband until she realizes he is underneath the controlling force.  Sam Rockwell never sees deeper than a surface George Bush (should that mean there was nothing deeper?).  And Tyler Perry wastes some scenes that could flesh out the tragedy of Colin Powell.

But for audiences it becomes a patronizing film, reinforcing horrors about Cheney that should be commonly known.  Sure it is basically factual and its side journeys and quick flashes about torture, lives casually taken or destroyed, legislation manipulated through test groups, are revealing reminders of the consequences of our not paying attention. The film does make us all feel even more stupid that we routinely elect such people to run and ruin our lives.  But don’t look here for an explanation of why we succumb.

There is a lot of evidence that Cheney saw early on how a simpleton president could be manipulated, but inventing dialog where that happened is not satisfying.  The dialog becomes more a shallow screenwriter’s view of drama than reality as Cheney moves from a hard-drinking dropout to the D.C. power player who rose through Nixon, Ford, Congress, Reagan and the two Bushes to in effect seize control of the country by the height of 9/11.  But quick looks behind the scenes of such power are neatly done, though (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Cheney’s actual motivations aside from power-grabbing are given short shrift.

Indeed, what Cheney did to the nation, the film argues with many facts on its side, is worse than Trump today but somewhat ominous as a direction Trump could readily move in.  The parallels in manipulation of intelligence data, of belief in the superiority of the president over all the other branches of government, the obfuscating of what is going on through the White House levers may continue today but “Vice” is different in one sense.

It suggests that the most likely way to emerge as the most powerful man in the country is to move invisibly and in secret, which is not what goes on today.

All the flash of makeup wizardry and rapid cutting can’t solve what “Vice” dances around.  No one even after this film has a clear grasp on who or what Dick Cheney is.  It doesn’t help to inspect his fall without exploring why we fell for it.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.