How Dick Cheney Got on Top: A Libertarian Review of Vice

The eight Oscar nominations earned by Vice—including nods for best picture, actor, and director—are a clear sign that official Hollywood enjoyed what’s meant to be a satirical takedown of the former vice president by director Adam McKay, who directed the hit comedies Anchorman (2004) and Step Brothers (2008) before going on to make The Big Short (2015), a flawed, but decent film about the 2008 financial crisis, for which he also earned a best director nomination.

No one deserves a cinematic savaging more than Cheney, so it’s disappointing that Vice only lands a few punches in the two hours that McKay takes to deliver what turns out to be—after you strip away several directorial affectations, including a gimmicky unreliable narrator, a few preachy montages, and a false “happy ending” at the halfway point—a fairly conventional biopic.

Hiding inside 50 extra pounds and expert make-up, Christian Bale nails Cheney’s off-putting mannerisms—hunched shoulders, cocked head, self-satisfied stammers, and a dead-fish death stare—while tossing off dialog in a growl just a notch or two less guttural than the one he used for Batman. This works as delicious dark comedy paired up with either Sam Rockwell’s hillbilly deluxe George W. Bush or Steve Carell, who shrewdly plays Cheney’s mentor Donald Rumsfeld as an older, more self-aware version of his character from The Office, bemusedly watching his erstwhile pupil metastasize into the master. The Big Short: Inside ... Michael Lewis Best Price: $1.49 Buy New $7.99 (as of 02:35 UTC - Details)

But the rest of the cast serve little purpose other than to fill the screen as McKay, via his narrator, just tells us what happened. How Cheney outmaneuvered the likes of Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Karl Rove, first to become Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff (the youngest ever) and then the most powerful vice president in history, ought to make for an engrossing story and offer insight into the personalities of a ruling class who managed to screw things up so badly.

Instead, montages lecture us that the real villains are the Koch Brothers and the Coors family, who created the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News because they hate paying taxes, and that Conservatism Inc. triumphed by weaponizing the angst of Americans who felt threatened by civil rights, abortion, and environmentalism. McKay does depict Cheney’s crafty ways around regulations that threatened his continued coziness with the oil industry, but he’s apparently not at all interested in Cheney’s ties to the defense lobby or the deep state—or in any analysis of the non-Fox portion of the American media who also cheerleaded every bit of the Bush-Cheney post 9/11 program both at home and abroad.

Analyzing neither the mechanics of power nor the moral choices of those who wield it, all we really learn about Cheney is that his metamorphosis from Yale-dropout, alcoholic telephone lineman into Strangelovian mastermind was sparked by his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) upbraiding him as a “big fat piss-soaked zero” after his second DUI at age 22.

When he arrives at the Capitol to serve as an intern, Cheney chooses to become a Republican merely to hitch himself to Rumsfeld, then a congressman on the rise, who later cracks up laughing when Cheney timidly asks, “So…what do we believe?” Why did Cheney choose to impress his wife by entering politics instead of some other line?

McCay’s Vice, perhaps unwittingly, offers one possible answer. Public service affords a legal, socially acceptable opportunity for people who can’t get ahead through peaceful production and exchange. Political entrepreneurs network their way into some position inside the state—or in some “private” firm dependent on it—then they trade favors, their currency the state’s power to redistribute what others have produced. Cheney worked this system better than anyone, bouncing back and forth between government and the quasi-private sector world of government contractors, reaching the top while helping the state to grow at the expense of society.

Of course it’s not the power of the state, but merely the misapplication of that power that seems to bother McKay, whose real beef seems to be with the American voters who just aren’t sophisticated enough to choose progressive politicians as their leaders—he ends the film with a scene in which a focus group discussing Vice breaks out into a brawl. Leave it to a filmmaker who failed to mention the Federal Reserve in The Big Short to ignore the elephant—and the donkey—in the room once again.