Movie Review: Vice

May 11, 2023

I found this movie at my local library and wanted to check it out because I had read a lot of reviews about it, and it got nominated for a lot of Awards at the Oscars in 2019. I haven’t seen many movies with Christian Bale, but I was curious about this movie, especially because I really love biopics/ biographical dramas and this movie is a biographical drama. I really love films from the film company Annapurna, who produced some films I saw: American Hustle, Detroit, Booksmart and If Beale Street Could Talk. This film was actually really good, and the acting was incredible. I have seen Sam Rockwell and Amy Adams in other movies, and really love their acting, and their performances in this movie were really good.

The movie opens in 1963 in Casper, Wyoming and a young man is arrested for drunk driving. Then the scene cuts to 2001 when Vice President Dick Cheney and his cabinet hurry into a room to discuss what immediate action to take following the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. Everyone is panicking, but Dick is quiet through it all and has an unsettling calm about him. The narrator, played by Jesse Plemons, tells the story about Dick’s life: what his childhood was like, his early career and his role as vice president to George W. Bush. The main theme of Vice is power and the abuse of power when people have it. When Dick was younger, people thought he didn’t have many prospects in life. He made mediocre grades and experienced a lot of failures in life, and he also drinks a lot and is kicked out of Yale for poor academic performance. His wife, Lynne, is upset and confronts him about it one day, telling him that she does not want to be with him if he is going to keep drinking because her father was an alcoholic who abused her mother, and she does not want to relive that trauma. Dick cleans up his act, and ends up finding a greater purpose in the world of politics by scoring an internship and becoming an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld. He learns the ins and outs of politics, and Donald keeps him on because he is quiet and tends to listen more than talk. In fact, that is one of the rules that Donald has for Dick, which is to be quiet and not act like he knows everything or ask questions that Donald considers stupid. One day he asks Donald what the Republican Party’s values are, and Donald just laughs and shuts the door in his face, not taking Dick’s question seriously. However, as he gains more experience in the political world, Dick ends up showing Donald that he knows his way around the ins and outs of politics and isn’t the naïve shy intern that Donald knew him as. There is a key scene when Lynne tells one of their young daughters that when you have power, people will try to take it away from you. As Dick becomes more and more involved in the political world, he starts craving more power and influence over decision making and when he becomes the vice president during George Bush’s presidency he tries to bypass a lot of the checks and balances in place. In another scene, he is at a restaurant with Donald and other cabinet members and they are ordering from a restaurant menu of laws they can pass now that they have total executive power, including Guantanamo Bay.

There is a great quote that the film shows that reads “Beware the quiet man, for while others speak he watches. While others act, he plans. And when they finally rest, he strikes.” Dick Cheney is a quiet person, but he was always forward thinking and was thinking several steps ahead. He wasn’t naive about the political world; he was very smart, and knew how power worked and used it to his advantage. In 1968, Dick meets Donald Rumsfeld at the D.C. Congressional Program and he joins the Republican Party because he is intrigued by Rumsfeld’s position on different issues. When he first meets Rumsfeld and is taken onto his team, Rumsfeld is blunt and gruff with him but he gives Dick the 411 on everything that happens in D.C. It kind of reminded me of this movie I saw a couple of years ago called The Wolf of Wall Street, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jordan Belfort. Like Vice, it is a historical drama, a biopic and a black comedy that shows in a satirical way how power is abused when it’s in the wrong hands. When he first decides to work on Wall Street, Jordan is an unassuming young man who is married and on his best behavior. But he meets an influential person in the world of Wall Street and he finds that Wall Street is a dog-eat-dog world and that he can only succeed if he tears people down and takes shortcuts through life. He is offered alcohol at his interview and at first Jordan declines, but the interviewer pushes him to have alcohol and makes fun of him for not wanting to drink, so Jordan gives into peer pressure because he is still young and doesn’t really know how working on Wall Street would change his life forever, nor could he have predicted he would lead a life with power and influence but also one of corruption, dishonesty and illegal activities.

The narrator Kurt uses a cool technique where he breaks the fourth wall in order to gain access to the audience. I have seen this technique used a lot, including a TV show I really loved called Fleabag. In the show the main character, Fleabag, talks to the audience and shares her innermost thoughts and feelings about all these awkward situations she is in. I watched one of the special features of the DVD of Vice and the director of the movie, Adam McKay, talks about how Kurt represents America. He works a regular job, he serves as a soldier in Iraq and he has a wife and a kid. But he is like the insider man for every action and thought Dick Cheney has because as mentioned earlier in the movie, because Dick was a private person they could not fully capture every aspect of Dick’s life or what was going through his mind when made certain political decisions or reacted to different situations, so they did their best to find someone else, a third party, who could give us, the audience, some insight into Dick, who remained a mystery for a lot of people. There is a part where Lynne says that the vice president job is a do-nothing job and that all he is going to do is wait around until the president dies. But for Dick, it was an opportunity to get to know more about how government operates and how to use it to his advantage. I remember when Will Ferrell played George Bush in a comedy sketch a long time ago and I found it very hilarious, but also the film shows how even though these people did a lot of crazy over the top stuff, it also led to a lot of serious consequences and the ones who paid the most for these consequences was the American people and also the people in the Middle East. There is a scene where George Bush is sitting in the Oval Office and tapping his foot up and down, and then the camera goes lower and we see a family in Iraq whose house is being bombed and the father’s foot is shaking up and down because they are scared and don’t want to get killed by the bombing. Seeing this scene from a Buddhist perspective made sense because in Buddhism we talk about dependent origination, which means that we are all interconnected and that no one’s suffering is separate from one another. While Bush is making these executive decisions, he doesn’t acknowledge that these executive decisions are putting the lives of real human beings in jeopardy, but he doesn’t care because the government of the United States is only focused on capturing Osama Bin Laden. However, as I thought about this movie from a Buddhist perspective, I came to the understanding that everyone’s suffering in this movie was deeply interconnected. Towards the end Kurt is running outside and from out of nowhere a bus strikes him and kills him, and he ends up having his heart taken out of his chest and given to save Dick Cheney’s life because Dick is suffering from several heart attacks and needs a new heart. As the surgeons operate on Kurt’s dead body, there is a montage of disturbing footage of torture, global warming, terrorism, mass shootings and other traumatic events that have happened in U.S. history. In a way it was showing that with all the suffering going on in the lives of Cheney and other people in the White House, so many people outside of the White House were suffering from war, famine and other large scale problems because the government often made decisions that jeopardized the welfare of these people. In an interview at the end of the movie, he turns to the camera and tells all the people criticizing him that he did what they wanted him to do, which was go after the people responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center, and that he won’t apologize for what he did. I think this last scene reminded me why it was so important to study history because history repeats itself and as apathetic as I was about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, I saw in the film how a lot of the rhetoric was echoed. There is footage of Ronald Reagan saying that he will help people get new skills and new jobs in a turbulent economy and that he will make America great again, which is the exact slogan Donald Trump used throughout his presidential campaign and his presidency.

It kind of reminded me of when I watched the movie Bowling for Columbine, a documentary that came out in the early 2000s after the shooting at Columbine High School. In the movie, Michael Moore explores the U.S. crisis with gun violence and interviews people from the National Rifle Association, Marilyn Manson and others about their attitudes about guns. I have been really reflecting on this film after seeing it a couple of years ago, because I have wondered if we are trying to take this action on gun laws and legislation, then why do all these mass shootings still occur at record numbers? It seems only in the span of a few months we have had a shooting in Uvalde, in Buffalo, in Nashville, in Louisville and most recently last week a shooting in Allen, Texas. It has all made my blood boil but it helped me to understand the history of guns and why our nation grew so gun-crazy over time, and why people say that they don’t really feel safe in America or even safe coming to America because of its gun violence problem. The documentary features real footage that is interconnected to the U.S. gun violence epidemic, such as the war in Iraq and the bombing of the World Trade Center, because all of these events were traumatic and involved the killing of innocent civilians.

Another important moment in the film was when Mary, Dick’s daughter, comes out to her parents. We see her leave the school upset and then she gets hit by a car and is taken to the hospital. When Dick and Lynne ask if she is okay, she tells them that her girlfriend broke up with her and that she is gay. Dick accepts her but Lynne finds it hard to accept Mary is a lesbian. Later on in the movie, Mary’s sister, Liz, runs in the congressional race and even though she said she would support gay marriage, she later changes her position and says that she does not support gay marriage and thinks marriage is between a man and a woman. Mary and her wife watch this, and Mary breaks down into tears because Liz betrayed her. When Dick meets with George Bush at his family’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, he tells George that he will support his policies, but the only policy he won’t support is George’s opposition of gay marriage because his daughter is gay. The scene where Mary is crying because her sister opposes gay marriage showed me how the decisions that politicians make can have a huge impact on the lives of ordinary people. I thought about the overturning of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court. They are a small group of judges, but they carried a lot of executive power and influence, and their decision to strike down Roe vs Wade undid a lot of protections that women and lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender, and queer people had when it was in place.

Honestly, even though the film has comedic and satirical elements, watching it gave me chills and it was frankly disturbing to see the impact that the lawmakers have on people’s daily lives, and how disturbing it was to watch people enjoy abusing power. In the film they show scenes in which prisoners are tortured, and it reminded me of this episode on Last Week Tonight where John Oliver talks about the torture system in the U.S. and some of the horrific torture methods they used on prisoners, and frankly I saw it several years ago but it was so vivid and brutal to hear that I still cannot get it out of my mind. It’s one thing to learn about what the U.S. government does and the systems it has in place in history class, but political satire such as John Oliver or Vice woke me up to how serious these issues were while presenting them in the light of comedy. Comedy has the potential to be entertaining but it can also bring light to a lot of divisive issues in politics, and of course, there is political satire in both the Democrat and Republican parties and nothing is without biases, but it presents a different way to talk about serious issues. I definitely had to keep in mind that Vice was a political satire because it does depict a living person and it was not a documentary about Dick Cheney, nor was it trying to be a documentary. The purpose of this movie was to shock and entertain but also to show how corruption and power has been an issue for centuries, not just in the present age. There is a scene that they talk about in the feature part of the movie where Lynne and Dick are in bed and they recite a soliloquy from a play by William Shakespeare and the soliloquy is about power. It resonates with the rest of the film because there is a part where Lynne tells her daughters when they are kids that people will try to take away power from you. She is angry because they are watching the results of the election and it looks like the Republican party is going to lose. She does everything in her power throughout the film to make her voice heard and make sure her husband doesn’t lose his influence in D.C. The filmmaker explained that we have all these checks and balances in the U.S. government because power and corruption have been issues throughout history and frankly people don’t exercise willpower very well. We all have innate desires and cravings, and so I think by making the movie a satire, somehow I think it showed how even though Dick Cheney held all these titles and played an influential role in the White House, at the end of the day he was a human being and he couldn’t be anything more than a human being no matter how much control and power he craved. I really like movies because even though this was a fictional movie, it gave insight into the human condition, which is that humans have unlimited desires but there is a limit to those desires and what we can have and when we give too much free reign to these desires it can lead to severe consequences. The film’s portrayal of Cheney shows that he wanted to control every aspect of the decision making process in government but it showed that even though he got the power he wanted, it led to many human rights abuses and a lot of people suffered at the hands of these abuses. Of course, I have never met Dick Cheney and I haven’t read a full biography of his life, so I’m sure the movie, like any biopic, had a lot of inaccuracies because even though it’s based on true events, it’s a fictional movie played by actors. But I am a fan of movies, and movies often provide me a way of looking at things from different perspectives.

One thing I really liked about the movie was the film score. It is heavy on the brass section and you hear these soaring lines with brass instruments just blaring this powerful loud sound, and I think it really fits with the entire tone of the movie, which is about power. Dick carries this powerful presence even as a quiet man and he controls a lot of what goes on in the White House even though he is vice president. I really love Nicholas Britell’s other work on movies such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, so I was really excited to hear the film score for this movie. I’m glad I got the DVD because there was a deleted scene where there was this incredible choreographed song by Brittany Howard and it was a musical number that took place when Donald Rumsfeld was explaining how to navigate the hierarchies and power structures of Washington, D.C. to Dick when he is first starting out in the industry. It got cut from the movie and when I found this out I was really sad but it was incredible to watch because it broke down everything so well and the dancing was amazing. For the movie score, I love the use of the piano and the key that the music is in, and I got goosebumps while listening to the score because it was so powerful and poignant. When I first put on the DVD and was on the main menu they played this incredible piece from the score called “The Lineman” and the way Britell combines the brass and the other instruments to create these sweeping lines was so genius.

It really helped watching the special features on the DVD, especially the one where they talk about the making of the movie Vice. In this feature the actors talk about what it was like making the movie, and Adam McKay talks about his inspiration for the film and his process of telling the story of Dick Cheney’s time in office. They also talk about the prosthetics that went into Christian Bale’s transformation into Dick Cheney, and how much work went into designing the outfits for the characters. It really made me appreciate how much behind-the-scenes work goes into making movies. Like, I can look at the credits and see all these names of people who worked in the visual effects department or the hair and makeup department but it’s not until I actually watched the feature at the end of the film and listened to the people in the various departments talk about how they designed the prosthetics or wrote the screenplay or designed the costumes that I could truly understand how much work goes into making a movie. And I also learned that not all the scenes made the cut, such as the musical number with Brittany Howard, even though Adam said he worked for months to try to incorporate the scene into the film. From the perspective of someone who is just watching the movie, this seemed sad, like, Wow, these people put in all this work and their work didn’t make it into the film. But I just thought, even if it didn’t make it in, it still served an incredible purpose for the movie and further added to the film’s satirical nature in how it talks about politics.

Vice. 2018. Directed by Adam McKay. Starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carrell and Tyler Perry. Rated R for language and some violent images.