Vice (2018)
I think there’s a danger in being so sure of yourself, so confident in the absolute necessity of your pursuit that you fully believe the ends justify the means. To be clear, I’m not referring to Dick Cheney—the subject of Adam McKay’s 2018 film, Vice—but instead, the filmmaking itself. Here’s a film that, from the very beginning, lacks any shred of forgiveness, empathy, or understanding. It exists to reveal the actions of a man alleged to be the most powerful vice president in American history, and it recognizes no alternatives to its depiction.
Perhaps there’s a broader flaw of the motion picture at work here. Perhaps cinema’s ability to imitate life and convey the illusion of reality works against McKay and company. Then again, his writing and carefree cinematic creativity (which worked quite well in 2015’s The Big Short) isn’t helping any. Throughout the picture, our intelligence is insulted with ham-fisted emphasis and outright demagoguery. Amy Adams quite literally tells us she needs her husband Dick because it’s 1963, and a woman just can’t be independently successful and powerful in these days (the actual dialog is probably a bit cleaner than that, but still). Perhaps the greatest eyeroll, however, comes when McKay shows us a literally heartless Cheney and the moment his biological heart stopped beating (Cheney received a heart transplant in 2012). We can come to these underscored conclusions on our own, of course, but even I must admit that through the film’s second half, as we see just how abhorrent so many of Cheney’s purported actions were, one gets the feeling that perhaps the film’s approach and depiction is appropriate. Is its tone ultimately justified? I can’t say with certainty, but I will say this: I’d rather get the information needed to make such a conclusion from a different medium.
★★