I was disappointed in Vice.

I quite liked The Big Short, which was made by many of the same people, most notably Screenwriter/Director Adam McKay. It took a hugely complicated financial scandal (the 2008 financial crisis and its origins in mortgage-backed securities), explained it in a way that was easily comprehensible for non-experts, made the exposition enjoyable and entertaining, and kept the story focused on the human drama, not the technical aspects. A big part of that was because it was based on the fantastic book, which did a lot of the work for the filmmakers. But the filmmakers did a great job, too, and lesser filmmakers could have really ruined the project. It does have a bit too much of a drunken frat boy style for my tastes, and overexplained a few things, but that seemed to be a deliberate style choice to get the message out better. I don’t like that choice, but I can’t really call it a mistake. I came away from that film feeling like I understood the financial crisis quite a bit better than when I went in.

The film Vice is similarly based on an exposé book of the same name, But Vice… the accuracy of the depiction seems less important than the fact that the film just doesn’t have much to say about Cheney. It tells a few events from his life, and humanizes him in a way that Jon Stewart once pointed out we only rarely got before from Cheney describing his health problems. Movie reviews like to focus on how the film seems to want to demonize and humanize Cheney both at once, and I can sort of see that. It’s not the film they would make if they were making a real hit piece, if they were trying to make Cheney look like a baby-eating devil. But it does make the argument that Cheney must be a heartless jackass over and over, but while also trying to make him a complex, relatable character. But my complaint is simpler: the movie doesn’t really accomplish either goal. I didn’t come away from the film thinking, “Wow! W’s Vice President sure was a jerk!” or “Wow, now I really understand poor Richard and his troubled life!” I came away thinking, “How much of that has anything to do with the real Dick Cheney?” Oh, I’m sure they did really well getting individual facts correct [update: they did not

For example, they keep cutting back to images of Cheney fly-fishing, a theme that culminates with an end credit sequence of fly-fishing lures (“flies”) that look like major events from Cheney’s and our national history: the twin towers, the White House, Cheney’s heart, etc. But here’s the problem: that whole gimmick never portrays any information about who Cheney is. It is used in one scene as symbolism of Cheney baiting others into doing things his way, but even that only tells you what the movie is doing. It doesn’t characterize Cheney. It’s decent filmmaking, I guess. It gives a feeling of connectedness to the film. But it needs to do that because the events in the film are so disconnected. It makes the film feel like a story, which it needs to do because there isn’t a story here. There’s no connectivity, no flow. And trying to create with medium a connectivity that they couldn’t produce with content is not an artistic choice motivated by trying to tell us the truth.

I rented this movie because I wanted to know more about Dick Cheney. I also returned this movie wanting to know more about Dick Cheney. It satisfied nothing.

Maybe the book is better. Maybe another book, like Days of Fire or Cheney’s memoir, would be more valuable. But whatever else there is out there, whether everything else succeeds or everything else fails to capture Cheney and explain him to the audience, the fact is that the film Vice failed. After that, what else matters?

Footnotes