The Bush administration is without a doubt one of the most polarizing presidential administrations in recent memory. The team in charge during the September 11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror, they were heavily in the spotlight through the end of Bush’s second term in 2009. Public perception of not just the president himself, but every major player on his immediate team, ranged from wildly positive to overwhelmingly negative.
So it’s only fitting that a movie centered around that administration ends up leaving audiences equally as polarized. The main player in Vice is Bush’s second-in-command, Dick Cheney, who was known as arguably the most powerful Vice President in American history. At the same time, he was also widely criticized, with his approval rating being 13% by the end of Bush’s presidency. That being said, it’s kind of difficult to make him come across as a sympathetic protagonist when portraying his life story on screen.
Well, director Adam McKay doesn’t exactly look to change anyone’s mind about the man. What makes Vice a unique experience is the fact that it doesn’t look to make a widely disliked person and show him in a whole new light. Rather, it looks to show the reasons why this particular individual was borderline universally hated. And the movie never once asks for anyone’s sympathy.
To have an unlikable protagonist is a tall task. This is the person who the entire movie is centered around, so if you don’t like them, it’s almost impossible to care about what they do. Cheney has often been compared to Darth Vader, and rather than be insulted, he fully embraced his similarities to the Star Wars villain, joking that it was “one of the nicer thing [he’s] been called recently” and feeling proud of the comparison. He was a huge proponent of plenty of widely criticized policies, and didn’t care what the people thought about him because of it. And the movie makes that note loud and clear. So if one wants to rope an audience in on a movie like this, they would need to do something extremely clever.
So, McKay - a man whose background and filmography revolves around comedy - does what he knows best and uses humor as a dominant narrative tactic, which ended up being a wise decision that worked well in the movie’s favor. Despite being in charge of essentially his own empire, Cheney in real life was a notoriously private individual, so in turn, no one truly knew what was going on through his head when he made a lot of his decisions, and he didn’t try justifying what he did when interviewed. So in an attempt to make sense of why he said and did all the things he said and did, the movie gives us a narrator to walk us through the events in Cheney’s life.
Kurt the narrator is unlike most narrators we hear in movies. Played by Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons, the movie frequently cuts away to this man, the only fictional character in the entire film. Kurt tries to reason with us as best as possible why Cheney made the decisions he made, making plenty of humorous comparisons along the way and delivering each of his lines with an infectious charm. Plemons has often been noted for his resemblance to Matt Damon, though as opposed to Damon - who usually plays well-liked protagonists - Plemons often plays oddball supporting parts or antagonists.
In Vice, however, Plemons gives his most “Damon-esque” performance. His performance is greatly reminiscent of Damon’s crowd-pleasing role in The Martian, without ever coming across like he’s doing a pale imitation. Just like in The Martian, Plemons looks right into the camera and gives us some of the film’s more memorably lines, keeping us laughing as he tries his best to explain Cheney’s actions. At one point, he makes a note how it’s almost impossible to know what Cheney was thinking because in real life, no one simply just expresses their thoughts out loud like a Shakespearean monologue - at which point, the movie breaks away to show what it would be like if people truly did that, in one of the film’s funniest moments.
In a fitting bit of irony, despite being the only fictional character in the movie, Kurt ends up being Vice’s most likable character, being a surrogate for the “likable protagonist” role that Cheney himself simply can’t fill. Not only does the movie frequently cut away to Kurt, but he’s given his own subplot, giving the audience a journey they can follow in good conscience. Kurt is an everyman whose life was directly affected at times by Cheney’s actions, including his role as a soldier sent to Iraq during The War on Terror. The movie showed us through Kurt how Cheney affected the country during his time as vice president, sometimes played for laughs, but also to dramatic effect, never coming across as too heavy-handed when doing so. This ends up being one of the best narrative decisions that McKay employs and one of the biggest reasons why this ended up working at all.
The movie itself is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on Cheney’s early life, and his time during both the Nixon and Ford presidencies. This is easily the stronger of the film’s two parts. We get to see Cheney enter the White House as a young intern during the Nixon era, and then working his way up to Chief of Staff once Nixon resigns and Ford takes over. At this time, we’re also introduced to Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, whom Cheney would have a close working relationship with through most of his career. Carell is an actor also known for his roles as a charming protagonist, and here he gets to channel a lot of that energy into something almost entirely different for him.
Rumsfeld is another man who in real life is known as a totally despicable person and did not care what people thought of him. Carell plays Rumsfeld as if The Office’s Michael Scott went totally to the dark side. He’s almost like an old-time cartoon villain. He’s incredibly funny and almost over-the-top at times, though most of the time, he’s insulting and uncaring, and loving every minute of it. At one point, he’s questioned about the morality of one of his decisions, and laughs it off for a good thirty seconds before moving on. Carell is another one of the film’s highlights, gleefully playing up a role that’s against his normal type.
We also get a good inside look - as best as possible - at Cheney’s home life, and his relationship with his wife, Lynne, played by a commanding Amy Adams. Bale and Adams work fantastically off one another, playing Dick and Lynne like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (which makes the Shakespeare comparison in the movie all the more hilarious). She’s incredibly supportive of Dick’s decisions and pushes him as much as possible along the way, even playing a huge part in his campaign trail in his early days. Like Carell, Adams has a natural likability to her, and channels that energy to play someone who’s nearly not as moral as many of her other characters, and it pays off in dividends for her in Vice.
Then we get to the movie’s second half, which focuses on Cheney’s time as Bush’s vice president. This was easily the part of the movie everyone was looking forward to the most. Unfortunately, this ends up being slightly underwhelming. While in the movie’s first half, it will occasionally cut away to some of the actual news reports at the time to help support its points, this part of the movie has a much heavier reliance on this device. The movie tends to lose a bit of the focus that made it so engaging in the film’s first half and feels more like a straightforward documentary rather than a humorous, fun narrative.
We still get to see a fair amount of moments of Cheney’s time both at home and in the White House, but due to the increased cutaways and frequent topic changes, there are times where the movie will transition and feel almost jarring and when it does try tuning in to what’s supposed to be an emotional moment, it doesn’t hit home as hard as it did in the film’s stellar first half.
While we do still see a lot of the two main Cheney’s - now joined by Allison Pill and Lily Rabe as Dick and Lynne’s daughters, both of whom giving solid supporting roles in their limited time on screen - everyone else in the movie takes a hit. Despite Carell’s Rumsfeld being just as prominent a figure in the White House as he was during the Nixon/Ford days, we barely see him anymore, and he’s given way less to do in the time he is on screen, at times feeling more reactionary than like the exaggerated villain we saw earlier. We’re also introduced to Tyler Perry as Colin Powell, which was spot-on casting, as Perry perfectly captures Powell’s mannerisms. But the issue is his time on screen is even more limited. There are moments where it’s clear he’s having a struggle of conscience which would have made for some truly meaty scenes, but rather than taking some time to see it played out, we get a quick narration explaining his thoughts quickly, and then moving on, making for some missed opportunities for some potentially great moments.
The biggest let-down was the use of Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush. Rockwell was easily the best casting decision in the entire movie. He absolutely nails it as Bush. Bush himself was one of the most parodied presidents in recent memory, and Rockwell plays the role almost to the point of a parody, giving us some really solid laughs by just the way he captures all of his little quirks and mannerisms. The problem though is, despite how the movie heavily advertises him, he’s only present for maybe a good ten minutes, just cleverly spaced out to give off the appearance he’s in it for more than you think. And after his first couple of scenes, like everyone else, he’s given less and less to do, squandering the potential for even more belly-laughs as well as potentially great character drama between Bush and Cheney.
Though then again, as much as we want to see more of the supporting cast, the movie is called Vice and the man at the center of this movie’s attention is Cheney. And if there’s one performance that’s easily the most consistently engrossing through the entire movie, it’s Christian Bale as Cheney himself. Bale is known for his method acting style, and how willing he is to completely immerse himself in the characters he’s playing, totally transforming his appearance. And Vice is no different. He embodies Cheney to a tee, playing him like a more grounded version of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho - cold, calculating, and all the time uncaring. He does what he does and shows no remorse for his actions. By the time we get to the movie’s second half, Bale is totally unrecognizable as he portrays an older Cheney, and at times it almost feels like we’re watching the real Cheney alongside Adams, Rockwell, and Carell. His performance is oddly mesmerizing - we never once approve of his actions, yet want to see what he does next, playing the role as someone we love to hate. Bale’s most shining moment easily comes at the end of the movie, which perfectly sums up the entire point of the movie and why we’ve been following this man we have no sympathy for.
Vice tends to be a very unfocused movie at times. It starts off fairly strong and then tends to be a bit more hit and miss in its second half, though when it hits, it hits hard. It definitely could have made much better use of its supporting cast, though when everyone does get their moment to shine, they give it their all, and leave us wanting more. Despite its flaws, it’s a consistently very funny movie, with an excellent lead performance by Christian Bale that’s supported by an equally engaging Amy Adams as well as Jesse Plemons’ wonderful narration. The fact that it centers around an unlikable person may understandably turn some people off, and may cater a bit more to people with certain political leanings. Honestly, this may have benefited more so if McKay just did an entire miniseries with these actors based on the Bush administration as a whole. But for a movie that wants to show us why such a disliked man was so universally despised, it gets the job done.
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