{"id":2277,"date":"2019-02-19T20:03:32","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T20:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2277"},"modified":"2019-02-25T17:11:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T17:11:24","slug":"oscars-2019-vice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/02\/19\/oscars-2019-vice\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2019: Vice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s restrained Green Book<\/em>, since Vice<\/em> is clearly from the makers of The Big Short<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

But whereas The Big Short<\/em> zipped from story to story in its quest to unpack the financial disaster of 2008, some narrative flourishes notwithstanding, Vice<\/em> 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\u2019t always that interesting or nuanced.<\/p>\n

To begin with, it\u2019s clear that McKay is hugely angry at what the Bush\/Cheney administration got away with in the years 2000 \u2013 2007. And many people, including me, share that anger. But this film doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s possibly worth it for the delirious audacity of this sequence.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the neat twist about who the narrator is and just what his role in Cheney\u2019s life turns out to be. He\u2019s not just a soldier who ends up in the war Cheney engineered for his own purposes. He\u2019s 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\u2019s also at this point that McKay’s fury overcomes his discipline. The operation scene, in which Cheney\u2019s heart is removed, is a very clumsy metaphor, underlining that \u2013 for these filmmakers at least \u2013 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\u2019s political career. Now, that\u2019s an undeniably shitty thing to do, but compared to orchestrating an actual war on an evidently non-existent pretext, it\u2019s pretty small-time villainy.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own words, but he\u2019s failed to notice that in this final speech, real Cheney manages to directly contradict movie Cheney. Movie Cheney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Vice<\/em> is rarely less than entertaining, and if there isn\u2019t much nuance in the performances of Tyler Perry, Sam Rockwell or Steve Carrell, then that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[521],"class_list":["post-2277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-oscars-2019"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-AJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2277"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2308,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277\/revisions\/2308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}