Vice (dir. Adam McKay, 2018) - Review

Download the Vice screenplay for personal, private use.

Two-time Bush administration official Stephen Krasner describes the flagrant rule-breaking of the sovereign state as ‘organised hypocrisy’ . Krasner’s phrasing is on the snappier end: warnings about the vicious reality lurking under the red tape of ‘world politics’ tend to get mired in jargon themselves. Enter Adam McKay, fresh from The Big Short, and determined to repeat his trick of ripping the bland façade from the juicy, nefarious and positively Shakespearean power struggles for the fate of the Free World.

Vice and The Big Short are the polemics of a filmmaker who—rather like his subject, Dick Cheney—has sidled into a position of understated influence over American society. “You want to be loved? Go be a movie star,” Christian Bale’s Cheney tells the audience through the fourth wall. “You've gotta deal with that reality that there are monsters in this world.”

McKay- who spent the noughties as head writer at Saturday Night Live, then as Will Ferrell’s production partner on classics like Anchorman and Talledega Nights- throws down his gauntlet with candour. The Big Short had Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining subprime mortgages; Vice gives us a waiter reeling off a menu of terms from ‘extreme rendition’ to ‘unitary executive theory’ to tell the smiling Vice President that “you can do whatever the fuck you want”. McKay employs all the Hollywood magic at his disposal to try to drag politics into the light: a half-plea, half-threat for ‘ordinary Americans’ to tune in, wake up and join him in ridiculing the layers of ‘expertise’ and bureaucracy that shield bogeymen like Cheney.

‘When a monotone, bureaucratic Vice President came to power we hardly noticed,’ muses the obligatory McKay omniscient narrator early in the film, ‘forever changing the course of history for and millions of lives’.

Vice plots the rumblings of ‘one of the biggest media and political machines ever created’ alongside Dick Cheney’s rise from the 70s, name-dropping Fox News, right wing thinktanks, and the Office of Legal Counsel among outlets which might prefer to claim objectivity. Christian Bale and the rest of the cast are McKay’s alternative political media machine: the A-list canon which he drew on to demystify the financial crisis.

Shapeshifting Welshman Christian Bale, sporting an additional 18kg of his own weight and probably the same in prosthetics, is the linchpin of McKay’s strategy: startling, star-powered, self-referential (Bale having played Batman, Liz Cheney criticised him for screwing up his chance at playing her father, ‘a real superhero’).

The film yanks the mask of boring pen-pusher from VP Dick Cheney with an enthusiasm traditionally accorded to Scooby Doo villains. Cheney is portrayed as an incarnation of pure evil, a modern Macbeth and ‘Galactus, devourer of planets,’ or, in Christian Bale’s Golden Globe acceptance speech, as ‘inspired by Satan’. McKay terms Cheney the ‘Unseen Man’ in one scene, where he features as a disembodied, donut-fondling hand, intercut with trembling CIA underlings and the brutal kidnapping he orders between bites. The movie is riddled with sensationalism, campiness, and shlock; and yet McKay’s rewriting of history seems kind of fair, since it’s about a man writing himself out of it.

Steve Carrell, also a collaborator on Big Short, explodes his wholesome image from The Office in his role as widely reviled Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The titillation of familiar stars bedecked in wigs, vintage tat, and the occasional fatsuit lies at the heart of McKay’s mission to entice his box-office buddy comedy audience into a political realm, and to pierce the fug of dullness and technicality. Amy Adams, as Cheney’s wife Lynn, and Sam Rockwell’s guffawing Dubya offer earnest interpretations of McKay’s narrative- but they’re balanced by some showbiz sparkle from Tyler Perry’s role as Secretary of State Colin Powell.

McKay is fond of flashing up title cards with cryptic quotes to give his nudge-nudge, wink-wink editorials a hint of gravitas. ‘Beware the quiet man,’ he tells us of Cheney, ‘for while others speak, he watches. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest... he strikes.’ There’s a certain irony in the fact that McKay—who failed to get an onscreen role in SNL and was overshadowed in the public eye by his partner Will Ferrell—has operated in a similar way.

From his time as head writer of SNL, to his wilful revision of recent history in Vice, McKay distills complex events into catchy jokes or sensational conspiracies, simultaneously acting as joker and as whistleblower. Despite the self-effacing tone, the boundary between overt satire and ‘documentary truth’ runs thin, as the film quietly rewrites legal definitions, invents meetings and suggests that Cheney’s father-in-law killed his wife. Asked by his daughter if fishing—the film’s metaphor for baiting and manipulating people by giving them what they want and quietly influencing them in the process—is a ‘good trick’, Bale’s Cheney answers that ‘it’s not good or bad. It’s fishing.’ Perhaps McKay can relate.

Áine Kim Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.