Why Am I Laughing? | Dave's Place

Vice a film by Adam McKay. With Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell. ****

I have weirdly mixed feelings about Vice. I want to give it five stars and want to give it one. The performances are brilliant: Christian Bale as Dick Cheney (he gained 45 pounds for the role, and has an uncanny knack for the man’s soporific monotone), Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney (she stayed in character throughout the filming, sometimes having political arguments with director Adam McKay in the guise of her character), Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush (he used a prosthetic device to simulate the man’s “lip forward” way of talking), and perhaps most surprisingly, Steve Carell (entirely convincing) as Donald Rumsfeld. Not since Charlie Chaplin played Hitler has a comedian made such a turn.

Sam McKay’s direction was also brilliant and often startling, continuing the schtick that he started in The Big Short, this time with a voice-over narrator who remains a mystery until two-thirds of the way through. McKay breaks through the fourth wall at the least likely moments. The whole thing is a virtuoso effort, perhaps his best.

The problem is in the emotions it calls up. In The Big Short we were laughing about people losing money, vast sums, often their whole life’s savings, but money is just money, we’re ashamed of how much we want it, we can almost always get more, or live on less. Vice—though it’s about money too (“I just heard my severance from Halliburton is $26 million,” Cheney says to his wife once he has become VP. She says something to the effect of, “Smart of them”) is also about people being tortured and killed, villages and cities getting wiped out. It’s one joke after another in which the punch line is, “And the poor bastards got killed.”

Let’s take the scene that most sticks in my mind (one of the things arguing for five stars is the number of scenes I can’t forget). It’s the post 9/11 world, and Cheney has sat down to discuss strategy with what seems to be a bunch of eager beaver political operatives. Someone offers him a Danish, and naturally he accepts (one of the weirdest things about Cheney is that he’s had multiple heart attacks but seems to have done little to change his life. He certainly hasn’t bought a treadmill). We begin to realize they’re discussing possible subversives in the United States.

One of them brings up a Muslim cleric in Brooklyn, and Cheney—as he licks the icing from his fingers—makes a joke about the man that has the others nervously laughing. The upshot of that witticism is that the man is hauled off a Brooklyn street, thrown into a van, and taken off, presumably, to be tortured, and never to have the same life again. If he has any life at all.

We’re laughing like those young men: this is a comedy, after all, by a man who wrote for Saturday Night Live. But we hate what we’re laughing at.

Another scene that sticks with me is when a middle-age Cheney—I think we’re about two heart attacks in—has walked into a room full of the movers and shakers in the Reagan administration. Vice President Bush (John Hillner) steps up and makes a request. (In the background his son George W. stumbles around looking drunk and disheveled, like a bum off the street. Was there ever a time when George W. was so much of a public drunk that he embarrassed his father?) The room is dripping with money and privilege, double chins, portly male bodies, expensive clothes. There’s so much in that scene, before anyone says a word, that is entirely revolting to me, to think that these are the people who were running our country. Lynne Cheney says to her husband, “Half the people in this room wish they were us and the other half fears us.” Cheney seems satisfied with that situation.

McKay portrays Cheney’s political rise as about power and nothing else, getting a job in the right place (even if it’s a dinky office with no windows in the Nixon White House) and not caring what you had to do. It’s about mediocre minds rising to the top. When Cheney asks his mentor Donald Rumsfeld the question, “What do we believe in?” the man can’t stop laughing.

Perhaps there’s an element of truth to all this (though Nicholas Lemann, in a recent New Yorker article, argues that Cheney wasn’t simply a power monger but was a true ideologue. He very much did believe in something). And I feel sure I was having the reaction McKay wanted me to, laughing so hard I was practically crying while realizing should be crying. This is the kind of movie that you enjoy in the moment but hate yourself the next morning. You hate what you laughed at. You hate the way you were manipulated.

I’m not saying don’t go see it. It’s brilliant. But I believe you’ll emerge with emotions as mixed as mine. It’s not a good feeling.

One final feeling (I wonder if others agree with this. I’m not sure even I do) is that this kind of lusting for power, this ruthless maliciousness with no concern for who gets hurt or killed (at one point Cheney even turns on his old pal Rumsfeld. There’s a certain satisfaction in that scene) is worse even than what’s going on in Washington right now. There is a cold-hearted and cynical malice in Cheney that I don’t find even in Trump.

I don’t know if that’s accurate, of course. I might just be watching a Saturday Night Live skit.

If so, it’s the best one ever.