Vice (Film Review)
Mar. 9th, 2019 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMore reviews unposted from recent weeks: Vice turned out to be a scathing satire which keeps the comedy painted on its barely contained volcanic rage. It's also preaching to the choir, of course, as I very much doubt conservatives are going to watch it. (I'm using "conservatives" in the traditional sense, i.e. I don't mean just Trumpists but also what remains of the Republican party that does admit to having problems with the current occupant of the White House.) It's even more preaching to the choir when you watch it in Germany, because seriously, back then there was cross-party consensus over here that the "weapons of mass destruction" charge was, to quote our then secretary of state, Joschka Fischer, talking to Rumsfeld during the G9 in Munich, "not convincing". To put it mildly. Bush II. was loathed, while I don't think many people were aware of who Dick Cheney was.
However, while the movie was at no point boring, did a pretty good job at tracing the various threads leading not just to Cheney's position in the Dubya years but to the current situation - the rise of Fox News and the decades of brainwashing that went with it, the destruction of anything progressive (Carter's environment-friendly solar cells on the White House being but one visual case in point), the accummulation of presidential powers, the Supreme Court as a partisan instrument (Florida!), the abandonment of even the pretense of following internationally agreed on ethical rules (yay torture! yay prisoners who are neither criminals nor prisoners of war and thus aren't given the rights of either!), and contains a lot of good performances, I find it ultimately lacking as a character drama, or dramedy, or however you want to put it.
Not because Christian Bale isn't his reliably good self. He delivers on every version of Cheney we see, from drunk frat boy to loving husband and father, from cog in the machine to super Machiavellian power player. But it feels more like a series of vignettes not connecting to a whole. By which I mean: early on, you see Lynne (Amy Adams is also very good) give Drunk Fratboy Cheney the "come to Jesus" speech, or rather, the "if you don't change yourself and become someone worth my time RIGHT NOW, you'll never see me again" speech, which galvanizes him to stop being a useless frat boy and start being a hard working future overlord in training. But it doesn't feel like there's an emotional connection between the young guy standing there getting metaphorically slapped into the face by his girlfriend and the clever manipulator later. They are both very well played by Christian Bale, but they don't feel like the same person. Even when there's the textual call back of Cheney observing drunk frat boy George W. during the Reagan years and then years later having his first serious conversation with Reformed Dubya about the later's candidacy, when the character brings up his own "wild" years as one of the ways to establish a rapport, there is an emotional disconnect.
It's similar with the scene where Cheney for once in his life chooses love over power - when he decides not to run for President himself so his lesbian daughter Mary won't get put through hell - vs the various other scenes when he does something ruthless. You don't get the impression of a multi-facetted man but several different men. To make a comparison to fictional guys: take my all time favourite Londo Mollari from Babylon 5. Who in the course of the show does a great many horrendous things. (Including starting a war under false pretenses.) But there is a connection between Londo's appealing characteristics and his dark side; the Londo who is enough of a romantic beneath the cynical aphorisms veneer to fall in love with a dancing girl is the same Londo nostalgic his home world's imperial past; that, too, is romanticism, and it bears toxic fruits. (And in yet another turn, this also makes him capable of sacrificing himself for his people.) There is no question of the Londo throwing exubarant parties in season 1 and the Londo watching the planet Narn bombed into the stone age in s2 is the same person. And that's what I'm missing in Vice.
Now you could say this is because JMS had several seasons of tv to tell Londo's story, while Vice is a two hour movie. But I think it comes down to something else, which perhaps is crystallized in a scene between Cheney and Rumsfeld when they're both working in the Ford White House; Cheney asks "Rummy", who at that point has the superior position and experience, "what do we believe in?", and Rumsfeld just laughs. That immediately felt fake to me, even for a satire. And also like a Doylist confession that our scriptwriting team and director didn't really have an explanation; to me, however, it seems that if you want to write a character like Cheney, you need to know what your version of this man believes in in order to create a whole person rather than a series of (witty, enraging) vignettes. Mind you, one reply to this could be: the point of the movie isn't to understand Dick Cheney, not even a fictional version of him. It's to expose what he (and others like him) did.
Of course, in many ways if you're a moderate or left-leaning, Cheney as a villain, and his rise to power, is easier to make sense of on your own than the Orange Menace's success and the way the various secret services and the military are suddenly hopes for damage control. Between Halliburton and all the government jobs in various Republican administrations he held, Cheney works as a a perfect embodiment of the military-industrial complex. The idea of him as the string puller and Bush the Younger as his stooge fits with narratives as old as Evil Viziers and Weak Monarchs. Basically: he fulfilles all the tropes, almost too easily. Now that kind of story offers hope of a happy ending (one day, the vizier is overthrown/there's a new government), which this film decidedly does not. It's positioned to arrive in a context where the rot accummulating in conservative America through the decades of Cheney's life has become all consuming. The film's narrator's identity is build on the not so hidden metaphor of the old consuming the future to keep their power, quite literally. But: the audience likely to watch this movie already believes that. So again I'm left with wondering why it was created.
In conclusion: an entertaining, frustrating work; overall, I'd classify it as an interesting failure.
However, while the movie was at no point boring, did a pretty good job at tracing the various threads leading not just to Cheney's position in the Dubya years but to the current situation - the rise of Fox News and the decades of brainwashing that went with it, the destruction of anything progressive (Carter's environment-friendly solar cells on the White House being but one visual case in point), the accummulation of presidential powers, the Supreme Court as a partisan instrument (Florida!), the abandonment of even the pretense of following internationally agreed on ethical rules (yay torture! yay prisoners who are neither criminals nor prisoners of war and thus aren't given the rights of either!), and contains a lot of good performances, I find it ultimately lacking as a character drama, or dramedy, or however you want to put it.
Not because Christian Bale isn't his reliably good self. He delivers on every version of Cheney we see, from drunk frat boy to loving husband and father, from cog in the machine to super Machiavellian power player. But it feels more like a series of vignettes not connecting to a whole. By which I mean: early on, you see Lynne (Amy Adams is also very good) give Drunk Fratboy Cheney the "come to Jesus" speech, or rather, the "if you don't change yourself and become someone worth my time RIGHT NOW, you'll never see me again" speech, which galvanizes him to stop being a useless frat boy and start being a hard working future overlord in training. But it doesn't feel like there's an emotional connection between the young guy standing there getting metaphorically slapped into the face by his girlfriend and the clever manipulator later. They are both very well played by Christian Bale, but they don't feel like the same person. Even when there's the textual call back of Cheney observing drunk frat boy George W. during the Reagan years and then years later having his first serious conversation with Reformed Dubya about the later's candidacy, when the character brings up his own "wild" years as one of the ways to establish a rapport, there is an emotional disconnect.
It's similar with the scene where Cheney for once in his life chooses love over power - when he decides not to run for President himself so his lesbian daughter Mary won't get put through hell - vs the various other scenes when he does something ruthless. You don't get the impression of a multi-facetted man but several different men. To make a comparison to fictional guys: take my all time favourite Londo Mollari from Babylon 5. Who in the course of the show does a great many horrendous things. (Including starting a war under false pretenses.) But there is a connection between Londo's appealing characteristics and his dark side; the Londo who is enough of a romantic beneath the cynical aphorisms veneer to fall in love with a dancing girl is the same Londo nostalgic his home world's imperial past; that, too, is romanticism, and it bears toxic fruits. (And in yet another turn, this also makes him capable of sacrificing himself for his people.) There is no question of the Londo throwing exubarant parties in season 1 and the Londo watching the planet Narn bombed into the stone age in s2 is the same person. And that's what I'm missing in Vice.
Now you could say this is because JMS had several seasons of tv to tell Londo's story, while Vice is a two hour movie. But I think it comes down to something else, which perhaps is crystallized in a scene between Cheney and Rumsfeld when they're both working in the Ford White House; Cheney asks "Rummy", who at that point has the superior position and experience, "what do we believe in?", and Rumsfeld just laughs. That immediately felt fake to me, even for a satire. And also like a Doylist confession that our scriptwriting team and director didn't really have an explanation; to me, however, it seems that if you want to write a character like Cheney, you need to know what your version of this man believes in in order to create a whole person rather than a series of (witty, enraging) vignettes. Mind you, one reply to this could be: the point of the movie isn't to understand Dick Cheney, not even a fictional version of him. It's to expose what he (and others like him) did.
Of course, in many ways if you're a moderate or left-leaning, Cheney as a villain, and his rise to power, is easier to make sense of on your own than the Orange Menace's success and the way the various secret services and the military are suddenly hopes for damage control. Between Halliburton and all the government jobs in various Republican administrations he held, Cheney works as a a perfect embodiment of the military-industrial complex. The idea of him as the string puller and Bush the Younger as his stooge fits with narratives as old as Evil Viziers and Weak Monarchs. Basically: he fulfilles all the tropes, almost too easily. Now that kind of story offers hope of a happy ending (one day, the vizier is overthrown/there's a new government), which this film decidedly does not. It's positioned to arrive in a context where the rot accummulating in conservative America through the decades of Cheney's life has become all consuming. The film's narrator's identity is build on the not so hidden metaphor of the old consuming the future to keep their power, quite literally. But: the audience likely to watch this movie already believes that. So again I'm left with wondering why it was created.
In conclusion: an entertaining, frustrating work; overall, I'd classify it as an interesting failure.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 01:34 pm (UTC)I wonder if the aphorism about how fiction has to be plausible and reality doesn’t also applies? I feel like part of the appeal of fictional characters is that that you can know them, and trust them to behave consistently.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 05:15 pm (UTC)>>Cheney asks "Rummy", who at that point has the superior position and experience, "what do we believe in?", and Rumsfeld just laughs. << It does sound very Rumsfeld though. I have to admit that, of that bag of snakes, he's the one I'd be interested in a biography of.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 08:18 am (UTC)Rumsfeld: there's a lot of him in the movie; Steve Carell is great in the part.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 10:43 pm (UTC)But I was surprised. Several conservatives had reported seeing it online, and how they'd found it interesting to see the other perspective, and it made them think about things in a new way. Yet, overall their view or rather consensus was that Christian Bale was amazing, but the movie had a strong bias and was difficult to take that seriously because of that.
I don't think the movie is really about Cheney at all - the filmmaters sort of make fun of the idea that it could be. They even out and out state at one point: "We don't know anything about Cheney's personal life -- we can speculate -- here's a few possible scenes as to what may have happened in Shakespearean verse no less, but we don't know a thing. He is an insanely private person and certainly wasn't going to share anything with us." But..."We do know what he did and the long term consequences of it -- so we are going to spend a lot of time explaining that to you in quite a bit of depth." Which is the unitary executive power -- that enables a President of the US to ignore Congress and to do things with huge global consequences -- such as fire a missal on Iraq. (In the US, only Congress can declare WAR on another country, except under special circumstances.) The movie is in a way a primer on the abuses of executive privilege and what that means globally.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 08:22 am (UTC)Well, like I said in my post, it works as a J'Accuse of the entire Republican Party and an overview of what happened through the last decades, but I am still doubting anyone would watch and listen who isn't already convinced of these very accusations.
Also: happy birthday, belatedly!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 02:04 pm (UTC)Why Conservatives are Cheering Vice's Portrayal of Dick Cheney
A Vice President with Few Virtues (A lot of the Conservative libertarians (these are the fiscal conservatives or moderates that don't want a militaristic presence and big government) hate Cheney. I know quite a few conservatives who despised Bush Jr and Cheney and despised Trump, they also despised the Clintons. (I work with a lot of them.) They liked HW Bush and Regan. There's a huge break in the Republican Party -- the moderate conservatives (HW Bush) vs. the ultra-conservatives (Bush/Cheney), which is further broken by the ultra-conservatives and the anti-establishment Trump Supporters.)
What I found interesting is the only consensus is that Bale was amazing. Everyone starts their review with that caveat. But outside of a few "extreme" reactions, which you will always find, a lot of the conservatives who saw the film took as a satire.
Admittedly this surprised me -- because I honestly couldn't imagine anyone who was conservative making it through that movie. (I agree with you -- it's very biased. They even have this bit right after the initial credits roll, where the director is defending his film and admitting its biased to an ultra conservative in a focus group. So they are sort of making fun of themselves. It really is a satire and a sort of a parody of the political bio-pic.) Bale would have gotten best actor for it -- if he hadn't said what he did during the Golden Globes and it hadn't gone viral.
Thank you for the birthday wishes!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 10:52 pm (UTC)And I find very, very few examples of the kind of discourse I'm looking for--discourse that doesn't apologize for Western civilization but also doesn't vilify it. And honestly, Londo is one of the only examples I know. He is guilty of horrific crimes; his society is guilty of horrific crimes, not just as a historical accident but baked into the ideology of their civilization. He has to face that and pay for it--but he is also a fully developed, interesting, loving, conscientious, evolving, intelligent person--and some of those traits come from his culture (friends, art, customs) too. Sometimes I find myself really sad that B5 is just so old (as pop culture goes) that most of my college students, even sci-fi fans, haven't seen it, because I keep wanting to say, "Look: this is important!" and not knowing where else to point them.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 08:27 am (UTC)Re: B5, a curse on Warner for shamefully neglecting it anyway. The DVD editions are from decades ago. (And I'll never forgive them for cutting the first scene of The Fall of Centauri Prime - barbarians!) No new dvds, no blue ray, nothing. I hear it's on Amazon Prime in the US now, thus available in a streaming medium in a part of the world (not in Germany), but where's the advertising? Bah.