Nominations:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actor (Christian Bale)
Best Supporting Actor (Sam Rockwell)
Best Supporting Actress (Amy Adams)
Best Original Screenplay
Best Film Editing
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Using the same formula that launched his 2015 film The Big Short to international success, Adam McKay plays to what he knows best and turns it up to 11 in his Dick Cheney biopic Vice. The result is a film that tries to balance too many metaphors at once, but still serves up an engaging piece of political history that educates the uninformed.
Admittedly as a millennial Australian with little background knowledge of Cheney, I don’t understand a lot of the backlash that has come against Vice regarding its accuracy. But even from my perspective it is clear that McKay’s intentions aren’t always completely aligned with the truth, with some parts of the film painting Cheney as a flatly villainous character. However Vice also has a level of self-awareness that almost excuses the many liberties that McKay takes with the story – “almost” being the key word here, as I currently linger in the grey area between it being either excusable or too smug about its own cleverness.
It is obvious that Christian Bale’s performance as Cheney himself is meant to be the main feature of this movie, and indeed he succeeds in pulling it through its lowest points and elevating it to its highest. At times his portrayal is oddly theatrical, but this seems to tie into McKay’s overall vision where Shakespearean soliloquys and moments of breaking the fourth wall aren’t out of place. As a result Vice constructs Cheney as a scheming political figure in the ilk of King Lear, Macbeth or Iago. But instead of facing any major downfall as these villains once did, he continues to build his empire off the misfortunes and struggles of other people.
It would be so much easier to simply accuse Vice of being too partisan, but what complicates this is its self-awareness and unconcealed acknowledgement of its own prejudice. Vice embeds these biases into its very DNA, turning them into jokes that, for the most part, work. This peaks at the self-referential mid-credits scene, but it also ties into the reveal of the narrator’s identity following a long teased mystery, when we discover that this seemingly significant person in Cheney’s life turns out to be nothing more than his heart donor. Cheney is depicted quite literally as the devourer of other people’s life forces, growing stronger as they grow weaker. As fascinating as the metaphor is it struggles to cohere with the many other metaphors that crop up throughout the film, revealing Vice to be a little too obsessed with nailing its intricate details at the expense of its overall image.
Its obvious liberal leanings and intense subject matter make Vice an obvious favourite for Academy voters wanting to make a grand statement against conservatives, but its political divisiveness will likely be its undoing when it comes to the preferential voting system. Christian Bale is almost certainly going to win in the Best Actor category, judging from the Academy’s almost yearly recognition of rigorous physical transformations and depictions of real historical figures. And if the movie is lucky it may pick up a couple of technical awards along the way as well, but all things considered its shot at taking out Best Picture doesn’t look great.
