Butler's Cinema Scene

Christian Bale as Dick Cheney

“VICE” My rating: A- 

132 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In 2014 comedy writer/director Adam McKay (a longtime partner of Will Ferrell) gave us “The Big Short,” a look at the 2008 market meltdown that featured gonzo moments like Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining subprime mortgages.     “…Short” was nominated for best picture and took home the Oscar for screenplay adaptation.

It now is clear that “The Big Short” was a test run for the narrative techniques and off-the-wall attitude that come to full flower in “Vice,” an absolutely dazzling/incendiary screen bio of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the George W. Bush White House.

This funny/unnerving instant classic features a transformative Christian Bale (he might as well start clearing Oscar space on his mantel), a host of terrifically good supporting perfs from the likes of Amy Adams, Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell, and a seductive presentational style that’ll suck you in even if you hate the real Cheney’s guts.

An opening credit informs us that this is a true story, “or as true as it can be given that Dick Cheney is known as one of the most secretive leaders in history.  But we did our f**king best.”

In fact, writer/director McKay goes out of his way not to turn “Vice” into a ham-handed hatchet job.

For the film’s first half — as we watch Wyoming roustabout Dick (drinkin’, fightin’, D.W.I.s) straighten himself out for the woman he loves (Adams), start a family and dip his toe in the slipstream of Washington power-broking — you may find yourself admiring the kid’s drive and smarts.

By the film’s end — after Cheney has shanghaied the nation into a never-ending Middle Eastern war and done his level best to  legitimize torture — audiences will be wincing under the savagery of the McKay/Bale depiction of this consummate politician guided less by political principles than a Machiavellian appreciation of pure, raw power.

“Vice” does a pretty wonderful job of fleshing out and, yes, humanizing a potent figure who is described by one character here as “a ghost,” a man about whom most of us know nothing.

The film covers (in brief, arresting scenes) Chaney’s education under then-Rep. Donald Rumsfeld (Carell), who instilled in the kid a taste for the ruthless exertion of authority and brought him along when he joined the Nixon administration.

Eventually Cheny becomes the chief of staff to President Gerald Ford where he begins formulating the “unitary executive theory,” which maintains that the President, just because he is the President, can do pretty much anything he damn well wants.

Throughout this recitation we periodically  drop in on the Cheney clan, and it is as a family man that this Dick Cheney seems most human.  He’s lovable and playful with his girls; he and wife Lynne are ahead-of-their-time understanding when daughter Mary (Alison Pill) comes out as gay.

Repeatedly we see the big man — who has heart attacks with the kind of regularity more associated with heartburn — retreating to the relatively calm and harmony of a Wyoming trout stream. (Fishing becomes a metaphor for Cheney’s canny handling of friend and foe alike.)

Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush

And there’s another device running throughout the movie. It is narrated by a blue-collar guy named Kurt (Jesse Plemoms) whom we see at a variety of jobs and serving with an Army unit in Iraq. Who is this guy, and why is he telling us Dick Cheney’s story?  The answer is pretty great.

After a stint as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney turns to private life, leading the international oil giant Halliburton. That’s when George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell doing a dead-on impersonation) invites him to sign on as his Vice Presidential nominee.

Initially the Cheneys are loathe to get involved (the Vice President’s is a thankless job) but Dick cons Bush into letting him handle some of the administration’s “more mundane jobs…overseeing the bureaucracy, managing the military, energy, foreign policy…”

But, God love him, Cheney tells W. that he will steer clear of any situation that would force him to betray his lesbian offspring for the sake of politics. “That’s my daughter and that line is drawn in concrete.”

Late in the film the Cheney clan will do an about face, with sister Liz (Lily Rabe), with her parents’ permission, throwing her gay sibling under the bus in order to win Wyoming’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Periodically the film veers into sublime weirdness. When our narrator laments that there’s no Shakespearean soliloquy that could explain Dick and Lynne Cheney’s inner thoughts and motivations, screenwriter McKay provides one, giving the pair a bedroom conversation in flowery iambic pentameter.

Towering over all this is Bale’s astounding performance as Cheney. The physical evolution of the man is hair-raisingly accurate (possibly the best makeup job in film history); so is that bone-chilling voice, rarely rising above a calm whisper. But perhaps Bale’s greatest triumph is that even as this character becomes ever more alienating through his actions (forcing Colin Powell to lie to the United Nations about Iran’s weapons of mass destruction), he becomes more monstrously interesting.

He may be a world-class villain, but this Dick Cheney is a villain you can’t take your eyes off, a villain who in the last scene turns to those of us watching and says: “I can feel your recriminations and your judgment. And I am fine with it. You wanna be loved. You wanna be a movie star. The world is as you find it. You gotta deal with that reality…What terrorist attack would you have let go forward so that you wouldn’t seem like a mean and nasty fella?”

Oh, yeah. Stay for the entire closing credits. (If you can do it for a Marvel movie, you can do it here.)

| Robert W. Butler