Vice 

Starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, and Sam Rockwell

Directed by Adam McKay

Released in theaters Dec. 25, 2018

Available on various streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime

Last night, I watched Vice. I had heard it was good. And that Christian Bale did an amazing job personifying Dick Cheney, a man that I believed, from everything I had previously read about him, was a deplorable human being. The film didn’t change my impression greatly, but it did leave me with a fuller sense of who he was and why he did what he did.

What I also appreciated about Vice was the approach the creative team took in making it. Rather than presenting a strongly fixed political viewpoint, which I was expecting, they used a clever dramatic device: a voiceover from an unintroduced narrator who peppered his narrative with subtlety snide remarks along the way. Snide enough to provide their political perspective (leaning to the left), but subtle enough to allow a libertarian or conservative viewer to go with the flow.

Vice doesn’t do everything it might have done if it were more ambitious. It doesn’t tackle the big picture – the complexity of political corruption — in an entirely convincing or satisfactory way. But, in fairness, that’s not what the film is trying to do. It’s trying to provide an explanation of how power, political power, corrupts. And it does so by depicting Cheney not as a Machiavellian monster, but as a very ordinary man.

And that makes it much more disturbing.

Critical Reception 

While the performances were universally acclaimed, the film polarized critics. Some considered it to be one of the best films of the year; others thought it was one of the worst.

* “What is perhaps most remarkable about Bale’s and Adams’s performances is that they supply depth and nuance to a film whose director appears to have had no appetite for either quality.” (Christopher Orr, The Atlantic)

* “When a movie’s premise is that its subject single-handedly moulded recent history, you want more depth and grandeur than this one provides.” (Matthew Norman, London Evening Standard)

* “It’s an ugly story of corruption, which wears a clown mask to make its horrors more palatable. And it works, both as a comedy and a scathing indictment of Cheney.” (Adam Graham, Detroit News)

* “In Adam McKay’s free-ranging, tone-shifting, darkly funny, super-meta, hit-and-miss, absurdist biopic Vice, Bale nails it as the resilient, backstabbing, front-stabbing, ruthlessly ambitious Cheney.” (Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times)

You can watch the trailer here.