From The Big Short to Step Brothers, Adam McKay has certainly proved himself to be a brilliant director, yet his latest satirical biopic Vice crumbles under the weight of its own biases–– it rewards a liberal imagination and illuminates little about political hawk Dick Cheney.
At the outset of Vice, there is a big red flag that sets the bar for the film’s veracity pretty damn low. In the opening text, the irreverent filmmakers admit that since Cheney was “one of the most secretive leaders in history,” telling this quasi-true story was more than a little difficult. But, “we f—ing tried.” As writer Jared Diamond articulates in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, getting to the root of any history is like peeling back an onion: there are layers upon layers of complicated and difficult information one must search through before arriving to any historical truth and understanding. The problem with Dick Cheney is that there is not much information on him to begin with.
Although I appreciated the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, I was still a bit worried for what I was about to watch for the next two hours and twelve minutes. Could I really trust Vice to give me a robust and engaging portrait of Dick Cheney if its creators were not entirely confident that they got it right? Or was this honesty actually an indication that the filmmaker’s tried really hard to get it right, and that I could just rest easy and enjoy the ride, accepting the film for what it is? In the movie, there is a scene where a wavering stack of porcelain teacups serves as a metaphor for the American political ecosystem. Eventually, the whole thing comes crashing down, conveying the instability of the dog-eat-dog world that is Washington D.C. For better or worse, the film also took on the tendency of this metaphor––by prefacing the film with the fact that they created a “quasi-true story,” everything that follow appeared as that precarious mountain of teacups, on the brink of becoming something too silly for a topic that deserved a more serious consideration.
Anyone who has watched The Big Short will immediately recognize McKay’s inventive (and often hilarious) narrative tactics in Vice, which usually aim to make complex sociopolitical realities more digestible to wider audience. In The Big Short, McKay did this often by enlisting the help from the likes of Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez, having them describe financial market concepts in purposeful cameos. These waggish lessons were wholly entertaining, ranging from Bourdain relating shady restaurant tactics to inner mechanisms of the CDO to Ryan Gosling using Jenga to describe what a financial meltdown in America would do to the global economy. Unfortunately, these breaking-the-fourth techniques employed in Vice felt less purposeful and more annoying didactic–– most of them were too preoccupied with conveying the destructiveness of the Republican party during the Bush administration than with getting at the essence of Dick Cheney’s motivations and character.
In today’s world, where the spark of a bad tweet can ignite digital wildfires in a matter of seconds, even assuming a thoughtful, centrist position can be the death of one’s online and real-world reputation. Nuance does not matter anymore. You are either on this side or that side. So when a politically-charged movie like Vice came out, the internet transformed into battleground where entrenched liberals and conservatives tried to stone each other down with 140-character diatribes. While some held the position that Vice unfairly vilified Cheney, others found that the film didn’t go far enough. Vice is certainly no lighthouse of insight into the character of Dick Cheney and the political era he dominated, but if it confirmed anything about our present moment, it is that the polarity in our country has far exceeded its boiling point.
