Movie #7 of 100: "Vice"

Movie #7 of 100: “Vice”

Overall Thoughts:

Going into the movie, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect: Christian Bale, huffing and puffing around set as he carried around 40 extra pounds of weight and extra muscle in his neck, weaving a story of both redemption (from former Vice President Dick Cheney’s partying ways all the way to the White House) and ruthlessness (Iraq War. Duh.).

Therefore, the movie gave me about what I expected, but it also gave a lot more than that.

The film added a bit of humanity to a character that it would have been all too easy to just pass off as pure evil and leave it at that. Instead, director Adam McKay made sure to imbue his Dick Cheney with a certain amount of understandability (I don’t know if that’s a word, but I’m rolling with it), a characteristic that makes viewers identify with the man who worked his way up from a grunt worker with the electric company to one heartbeat away from the presidency.

Bale’s Cheney was a master at something truly remarkable: dominating a scene while simply remaining quiet and observing. That quality is usually absent in high-profile biopics, but the film’s insistence on amplifying that important characteristic of the former vice president was a very smart idea that definitely worked to the movie’s benefit.

The movie’s non-linear approach may have thrown some folks off, but I felt it gave some important context to some key moments in the former VP’s life, and the mix of narrative documentary, dark comedy, and heavy-handed drama made for an entertainment experience that was impossible to predict and even more difficult to forget about after I walked out of the theater.

Favorite Performance:

It would be easy to just cast my lot with Bale, who will likely get nominated for an Academy Award for his performance, but I’m going to lean toward Amy Adams, who did a great job of playing Lynne Cheney.

While most moviegoers would expect Dick Cheney to be the ruthless brains behind the operation, Adams made sure to play his wife in a way that made her absolutely imperative to the story of both his life and of the film itself. She was a tour de force, to use an incredibly hackneyed phrase, and she should certainly get a great deal of credit for injecting some real tension and drama into the movie.

Favorite Scene:

The scene in which Dick Cheney, settling into his first job in the White House, is sitting in his tiny, cramped office is one of, if not the best, bit of acting in the whole film.

The delightful mix of sheer glee at being able to call his family from the White House, the smirking confidence of a tactical battle well won, and the bewildered “what comes next” in his eyes was probably the movie’s defining moment for Bale, as he got to bring all of his acting ability into one scene. He had to act with his eyes, his words, and his body language, and he somehow managed to nail all three facets of the performance with flawless execution.

Stars: 4 out of 5