Oscars 2019: Vice
Posted on February 19th, 2019 in At the cinema, Culture | No Comments »
Adam McKay is the other comedy director trying to prove his worth to the Academy with meatier subject matter, but this is less of a surprise than Peter Farrelly’s restrained Green Book, since Vice is clearly from the makers of The Big Short, with the same machine-gunning of information at the viewer via archive footage, voice-over narration, on-screen captions and generally anything else the director can think of.
But whereas The Big Short zipped from story to story in its quest to unpack the financial disaster of 2008, some narrative flourishes notwithstanding, Vice is pretty much a straight telling of the rise of Dick Cheney from Congress back-room-boy to the most powerful deputy President America has ever seen. In some ways, this is a relief. Less reliance on fourth wall-breaking for its own sake makes for a more absorbing film and allows the performances to speak for themselves. But it does also reveal a narrative that isn’t always that interesting or nuanced.
To begin with, it’s clear that McKay is hugely angry at what the Bush/Cheney administration got away with in the years 2000 – 2007. And many people, including me, share that anger. But this film doesn’t always know where to direct that anger or how to make good use of it, and especially in the final twenty minutes, it just seems a bit shouty.
There are two flourishes worthy of (spoilery) mention. One is the pushed-to-the-max, Python style, mid-movie credits fake-out. A lot of the early part of the film, establishing how the younger Cheney got his start in politics, is not that interesting, useful as it possibly is for setting up an MO and for setting up characters like Donald Rumsfeld who we will meet again later. But it’s possibly worth it for the delirious audacity of this sequence.
Then there’s the neat twist about who the narrator is and just what his role in Cheney’s life turns out to be. He’s not just a soldier who ends up in the war Cheney engineered for his own purposes. He’s the heart donor who allowed Cheney to keep on living. This is smartly done and allows for a recontextualization of the whole story, but it’s also at this point that McKay’s fury overcomes his discipline. The operation scene, in which Cheney’s heart is removed, is a very clumsy metaphor, underlining that – for these filmmakers at least – it seems as if the worst thing Cheney did in his entire life was to throw his gay daughter under the bus in order to further his straight daughter’s political career. Now, that’s an undeniably shitty thing to do, but compared to orchestrating an actual war on an evidently non-existent pretext, it’s pretty small-time villainy.
And the lack of focus really becomes apparent in the final speech direct to camera, where Cheney dares us to criticise him. McKay is notably proud that these are all culled from Cheney’s own words, but he’s failed to notice that in this final speech, real Cheney manages to directly contradict movie Cheney. Movie Cheney’s fault is that he has no principles, and is just out to increase his own power and influence for the sake of having power and influence. But the, possibly scarier, truth is that everything Cheney did, he did because of a very real and quite profound ideology.
Vice is rarely less than entertaining, and if there isn’t much nuance in the performances of Tyler Perry, Sam Rockwell or Steve Carrell, then that’s to be expected. The real pleasures of this film though are Christian Bale and especially Amy Adams who manage to get under the skin of their parts in a way which the frenetic script rarely does.
Tags: oscars 2019