Vice (2018) Review
6/10
A man is pulled over for drunk driving in Wyoming in 1963, is failing at everything, and is told by his wife that she will leave unless he becomes somebody. Forty years later he is the most consequential vice president in American history.
The 6 is a split. The performance is extraordinary, the subject is important and underexplored, and the film keeps stopping to be clever in ways that undercut both. Adam McKay’s technique from The Big Short is applied to material that needed less of it.
What the film gets right is the mechanism of accumulated administrative power, which almost nothing else has attempted. What it gets wrong is trusting the audience with it.
Bale
He gained a reported forty-five pounds, shaved his head, and built a voice and a physical arrangement that are nothing like his own.
The technical work is not the achievement. The achievement is that Bale plays a man who is deliberately unreadable, and finds a way to make opacity watchable for two hours.
Cheney in this film says very little, listens, and answers questions with questions. The performance is built on a specific quality of attention, a man who is calculating in every scene and never indicates that he is.
The Nixon White House sequences are where that is established. He is a junior aide, is present at meetings, says almost nothing, and the film shows him learning what the office really contains by watching somebody else misuse it.
The best moment is the smallest. Asked to be vice president, he pauses, and then negotiates for portfolio, and the whole film is in the length of that pause and the flatness of what follows it.
The fly fishing sequences are the other place he does it. Cheney fishes throughout the film, is silent while doing it, and McKay uses the activity as the visual signature of a man whose whole method is patience.
Bale also declines the impersonation. The voice is close without being exact, the posture is built instead of copied, and the performance is a construction of somebody instead of a reproduction of footage.
An unreadable character is the hardest thing to make watchable and the technique is attention. Show them listening, precisely, and the reader supplies the calculation. The failure mode is giving them an interior monologue. The moment you explain the calculation, the opacity is gone and so is the character.
Physical transformation is what gets noticed and is never the achievement. What matters here is a quality of stillness.
Play the pause. A decision made slowly, followed by a flat practical request, tells the reader everything about how somebody operates.
The Unitary Executive
The film’s real subject is a legal theory about the scope of presidential authority, and it is the most valuable thing in the picture.
The argument is laid out properly. A reading of Article Two holding that the executive branch is answerable only to the president, developed over decades in memoranda and legal opinions, and applied after 2001 to detention, surveillance and the conduct of war.
The film also tracks the theory’s institutional history properly. Ford’s White House, the Iran-Contra minority report, the Office of Legal Counsel, and the point is that the argument was assembled over thirty years by people who expected to need it.
That is genuinely difficult material to dramatize and the film mostly manages it. The sequences with David Addington explaining the theory are clear, specific and the best writing in the film.
The one-percent doctrine is the other idea the film lands. If there is a one-percent chance, treat it as a certainty, which is a policy stated in a sentence and is the clearest explanation anybody has filmed of how the decisions of that period were reached.
Addington himself is played by Don McManus in a handful of scenes and the character is the film’s most useful invention as a device. Somebody has to say the theory out loud, a lawyer explaining his own work is the natural vehicle, and the film uses him and then drops him.
What the film understands is that this was not a coup. It was a series of legal opinions, appointments and procedural decisions, each defensible in isolation, accumulating into a permanent change in how the office works.
The film is also careful that none of it was hidden. The memoranda were written, the appointments were confirmed, the opinions were filed, and the argument is that a sufficiently procedural change does not require concealment because almost nobody reads procedure.
The Tricks Get in the Way
The film has a narrator whose identity is a reveal, a fake end credits sequence at the midpoint, a Shakespearean pastiche between Cheney and his wife, a cooking metaphor, and a direct-address epilogue about focus groups.
Some of this works. The false credits are a genuinely good joke and the narrator device pays off in a way that connects the personal and the political.
Most of it does not. The Shakespeare sequence is the clearest failure, a scene in which two characters discuss ambition in pastiche verse, which stops a film that had been building institutional argument so as to make a literary comparison nobody needed.
The problem is proportional. Every device is an interruption, the subject required sustained attention, and the film keeps signalling that it does not trust the material to hold an audience without a joke.
A formal device is an interruption and you can afford a small number of them. The Big Short needed them because its subject was incomprehensible and this subject is merely complicated. Count your interruptions. If the reader has been pulled out of the argument more than three or four times, the argument is not being made.
Trust follows from clarity. A writer who explains something well does not need to reassure the reader afterward that it was interesting.
The device that works here connects two registers. The narrator’s identity joins the personal and the political, which is what a device should do, and a pastiche scene joins nothing.
The Big Short comparison is the fair one to make. That film had to explain collateralized debt obligations to an audience with no route in, so a celebrity in a bathtub was solving a genuine problem. This film has to explain that a man wrote memoranda.
Amy Adams
Lynne Cheney is written as the origin of the whole thing and Adams plays her as somebody with more ambition than the period would let her use.
The early material is the strongest. She is brighter than him, has no available route, and delivers an ultimatum in a kitchen that is the most direct statement of the film’s argument about what she could and could not do in 1963.
The Casper sequence establishes her ceiling precisely. She is in Wyoming in the early sixties, has ability and no institution that will take it, and her father’s treatment of her mother is in the frame without a word about it.
The film then largely loses her. The middle two acts give her a health crisis, a speech and a supportive presence, and the character who set the plot in motion becomes a spouse in the background of a political career.
That is the film’s other structural failure and it is a waste. A story about two people’s shared project told as one man’s rise has abandoned half its premise.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Best Actor went to Rami Malek. Bale was nominated, the film received eight nominations, and it won one, for makeup and hairstyling.
The comparison is the one this page makes. Malek’s Freddie Mercury is a technically accomplished impersonation in a biopic that sanitizes its subject, and Bale’s Cheney is a construction of somebody deliberately opaque.
Both are transformations and they are different kinds. One reproduces a performer whose mannerisms are on film and available to study, and the other invents an interior for a man who never revealed one.
That is also why impersonation dominates the acting categories. A performance measurable against a documented original gives every voter the same yardstick, and an invented interior gives them nothing at all that they are able to agree about.
The winner’s film also had a troubled production, a director removed during shooting, and a substantially better commercial result, and the last of those is the variable that appears in almost every entry on this page.
Bohemian Rhapsody took around nine hundred million dollars worldwide and this took about seventy-six, which is a ratio of nearly twelve to one. A voting body watches films and it also reads the same trade coverage everybody else does.
Reproducing somebody documented and inventing somebody opaque are different tasks and the first is easier to assess. A reader can check an impersonation against the record and cannot check an invention against anything. The assessable version wins. That is true of any work measured against a known original.
Eight nominations and a makeup win means the transformation was the thing everybody agreed on. It is also the one element of the film that was least important.
Steve Carell as Rumsfeld is the other performance worth naming and it is doing something different. Rumsfeld is loud, delighted with himself, and openly cynical, and the film uses him to establish by contrast that Cheney is the one who never says anything.
A subject that matters is not a defense against a structure that does not work. This film has the more important argument and interrupts it repeatedly, and the interruptions are why it is a 6.The heart attacks are the film’s one recurring device that earns its place. Cheney has five across the picture, each is staged identically and briefly, and the repetition establishes a man who keeps being told he is dying and keeps returning to work.
Should you watch Vice?
Half of it. An extraordinary performance built on stillness and not on the weight gain, the clearest account anybody has filmed of how administrative power accumulates through legal memoranda, and a set of formal tricks that keep stopping the argument to reassure the audience it is being entertained.
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