The opening scene in VICE—Adam McKay’s new movie in which Christian Bale becomes Dick Cheney—takes place on a country road in Wyoming after sundown. It’s the late 1960s. We’re following a car as it fishtails toward the blackened mountain skyline. Cheney, young, working as a utility pole repairman, is behind the wheel, piss-drunk.
The tone here is unnerving—the scene plays like a passage into Hades. It’s a note-perfect opener. Because contrary to what you may have heard, VICE is not just a Cheney biopic from the team that made The Big Short. VICE is a two hour evisceration of America’s political system—a system that allowed Cheney to metastasize from an observant power-hungry DC intern into a monstrous politician who destroyed Iraq so America could broker access to its oilfields.
It’s like Apocalypse Now, except we’re not in Cambodia (though we do see it get bombed at one point). This time, Cheney is our Willard, guiding us into the White House, the Pentagon, and the manicured estates where politicians sip Coors and go fly fishing. The film also takes us into fetid rooms where Iraqi and Afghan civilians are being tortured to fulfill the blood-soaked foreign policies that Cheney and his Ivy League-educated accomplices inflicted upon the world.
Let me be clear—American audiences are not ready for how devastating this movie is.
The early buzz on VICE was all about the 50 pounds that Christian Bale packed on to properly portray Cheney. (Bale told Variety that he “ate a lot of pies,” which is a funnier answer than most of what transpires in VICE.) Early reviews have ranged from acclaim to outright hatred. The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern and Kevin Fallon declared that VICE “might be the worst movie of the year.” One of their beefs is the way that McKay’s script humanizes Cheney—a man who not only sanctioned the obliteration of a sovereign country, but also threw his lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney, under the bus to boost his other daughter, Liz Cheney’s, political career.
Tempting us to sympathize with someone like Cheney does sound dodgy on paper. But I walked out of VICE with more contempt for Cheney than I had when the lights went down. I suspect plenty of people will storm out of the theater equally enraged (and in need of whiskey). Because what VICE does exceptionally well is depict how America’s competitive, dick-swinging political culture brought out Cheney’s evil side.
The best compliment that can be paid to VICE is that it’s the closest thing to justice that Cheney has faced yet. Just like The Big Short presented audiences with the cruelty of what the big banks did to the American people, VICE is a scathing memento of Cheney’s impact on American democracy, and how our political system, by design, rewards power-hungry men like him. Like The Big Short’s apocalyptic ending, the dark resolution of VICE will leave moviegoers not only angry and depressed, but asking each other, “What can we do about this?”
VICE is too respectful of its audience to dole out easy answers, but my ears perked up during one particular scene in the White House, where Rumsfeld—not exactly beloved by the Nixon administration, which wants to send him to Belgium—is explaining to young Cheney how being pushed around is part of the long game that one plays to acquire influence in American politics.
“I’m like bed bugs!” Rumsfeld declares. “You’ve gotta burn the mattress to get rid of me.”
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