As you may already be aware, Vice tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.
The film is written and directed by Adam McKay, who makes no bones about his own motivation. It springs from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising, because it informs Vice from the first minute to the 132nd and last.
But whether or not you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet, who for pure malignancy makes the White House’s present incumbent (of whom there is a fleeting glimpse) look like Forrest Gump, it has to be said that he presents it very entertainingly.
Christian Bale, pictured, plays Dick Cheney in Adam McKay's new movie, Vice
That said, he also deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. So we get jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, to be revealed in a late ta-da! kind of flourish.
It’s almost as if McKay, and his editor Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wrong to call them one-trick ponies, though. They have dozens of tricks.
If you can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award next month for his remarkable lead performance, rendering himself almost unrecognisable and nailing Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.
It shows how Cheney makes it from being a drunk construction worker to George W Bush's Vice President, with the president played here by Sam Rockwell
Last year’s Best Actor, you’ll recall, was Gary Oldman for his turn as Winston Churchill. But Oldman didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale — both physically and temperamentally — does Cheney.
As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
I happened to catch Adams in her breakthrough movie role on TV the other night, as conman Frank Abagnale’s gullible, guileless fiancée Brenda in the marvellous 2002 film Catch Me If You Can.
Christian Bale, pictured, has been nominated for Best Actor for his role in Vice
In the years since then Adams has acquired the heft to play Brenda’s precise opposite. Her Lynne Cheney is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.
How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that ‘the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit’, is the film’s narrative.
It begins in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.
They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). Not least of the fascinations of this film lies in the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.
After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the shrewder, more Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs highest — with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a hilarious, if ludicrous, scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.
His appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever enough never to look greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated, also wonderful) invites him to become his running mate — ‘a nothing job,’ snorts Lynne — he plays hard to get. He’s happy running an oil company, he says.
Bale and Rockwell, play Dick Cheney and George W Bush in the movie which has also been nominated for an Oscar
Eventually, he says he’ll do it only if he can take on some of the more ‘mundane’ jobs, such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy.
McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.
Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He turns even the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.
McKay himself is smart enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: ‘I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.’
Whatever, it will be no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice next month, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release at Christmas, to see it flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.
The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is no.
The Mule (15)
Verdict: Stubbornly watchable
Rating: 
And so to the actual Peoria, where in The Mule, nonagenarian horticulturalist Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood) wins awards for his day lilies but not for
