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| Christian Bale, amazingly, as Dick Cheney |
“The
Fog of Truth”
A Review of Vice by Nick Olszyk
MPAA Rating, R
USCCB Rating, L
Reel Rating, Two Reels
Former low-brow
comedy director Adam McKay rose to enormous success in 2015 with The Big Short, an abrasive and clever comedy
about the 2008 financial crisis. With Vice,
it appears he wished to return to that same magical well, but – like other
sophomore efforts – the well has run dry. It may be that McKay was doomed from
the start. He openly admits in the opening credits that there “was little info”
about the inner life of former Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale).
Thus, the film feels fudged in some way, much like the repudiation of its
subject.
McKay begins with two turning points
in Cheney’s life, separated by forty years. The first occurs in 1963 when he
gets a DUI and a dressing down by his girlfriend and future wife Lynne (Amy Adams).
The second unfolds in the first crucial hours after the 2nd plane
hit the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. In both instances, Cheney
was able to step back, look at the bigger picture, and view a crisis as an
opportunity for action. The film then progresses chronologically, starting with
his time as an intern to then Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) where
he learns the fine art of secrecy to eventually becoming perhaps the only Vice
President who held real political power. When history thrusts America into its
darkest hour since WWII, Cheney comes to believe that it is his duty to protect
his citizens at any cost, even if that includes their own privacy, rights, freedoms,
or opinions.
The phrase “the fog of war” refers to
how a lack of information regarding the enemy makes battle plans difficult to
predict and often leads to unexpected loss of life. For Cheney, there is a
similar “fog of truth” he learned while watching Nixon’s downfall close-up, launching
to a career where information was closely guarded and almost immediately
destroyed after use. Unfortunately for McKay, this problem seriously affects
the film’s potency. The Big Short was
famous for its short vignettes with celebrity cameos to explain complicated economic
concepts. This worked well because 1) he had great source material in Michael
Lewis’ book and 2) his audience needed these scenes because most people don’t
understand Wall Street. In Vice, similar
scenes – while humorous – are forced, disjointed, and confused due to a lack of
factual evidence. The audience gets a sense that Cheney is working the system, but
it’s so easy to see McKay’s handiwork that we don’t trust his analysis.
It’s this “obvious handiwork” that
is Vice’s great Achilles heel. Early
on, McKay makes the assertion that cable news has an inherent bias to the
right. While this may be true for Fox News, it completely ignores the bias to
the left present in CNN and MSNBC programming. Vice has a painfully obvious blind spot to its own biased opinions;
McKay’s distain for Cheney and right-wing policies is constantly evident. Consider
how the single “good thing” Cheney does in the whole film is support his
daughter’s homosexuality which is given an inordinate amount of screen time. McKay
wants to pretend he is being fair, so he finds the one “progressive” element of
Cheney’s personality and sells it hard.
There’s one analogy that McKay especially
wants to enforce: that Dick and Lynne are the modern day MacBeths. He is a
quiet man of power and intrigue; she is the seductive voice that pushes him to
do dark deeds. They even share a faux soliloquy while in bed together that ends
in – gratefully ungraphic – sexual consummation. It’s hard to take seriously a
message that is, well, a message and not an organic part of the story. It’s not
always necessary for a film to compliment an audience’s beliefs and even
healthy to engage opposing viewpoints, but it should always be honest about its
intentions.
The picture of Cheney that emerges
from Vice is not an inherently evil
monster but someone who was groomed early on for underhanded deeds, believed fiercely
in his own worldview of protecting America, and was willing bend any rule – divine
or secular – to achieve his goals. Ultimately, this led to a series of rash
decisions, made for manipulative reasons, that landed us in an unjust and
unsuccessful war and continues to plague our nation today.
This picture may be partially correct,
but again, it’s hard to trust the filmmakers. Pope St. John Paul II said his
favorite bible verse was John 8:32:
“And you will know the Truth, and
the Truth will set you free.”
He recognized
that the 21st century is still living in a quasi-Orwellian world
dominated by a power struggle to enforce competing interpretations of the
truth. McKay has not provided the audience with the necessary evidence to back
up his opinion. He did succeed, however, in getting me interested in Cheney’s
life, driving me to check out his autobiography from my local library to see
his side of the story.
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