Vice

Cavils have been raised against this film. There may be some factual errors (e.g. Richard Armitage, not Libby, leaked Valerie Plame Wilson’s secret agency). Inadequate attention is paid to what most dramatically distinguishes Dick Cheney from Donald Trump: Cheney’s insistence on expanding American influence abroad, not abandoning it. 

But this is a movie. It’s not a biographic essay or a character analysis. It’s a story that uses the historic particulars of Cheney to reveal a truth beyond his specifics. 

So the title is not Vice-President Cheney. Its focus narrows to Vice. That can be read at least three ways. One, it abbreviates the title only to enlarge the character’s role. It excludes “president,” as Cheney elbowed George Bush out of key presidential authority (military, energy, foreign policy) as a condition of becoming his running mate. 

  The title also refers to the vice-like grip that Cheney thus put on American government, especially by promoting the argument that the president stands above the law. As Nixon argued wistfully and Trump insists urgently, If the president does something, whatever it is, however illegal, it can’t be considered illegal because the president did it. 

Third — and here the film shows its political point —  that argument is a vice, a crime, a sin or weakness, because it flies in the face of the US constitution which the Founding Fathers developed to escape regal tyranny not to create one. That is the film’s key thrust and clarion call to current concern about the American government.  

At several points writer/director Adam McKay dramatically reminds us that he is not passively recording a reality but purposefully telling us a story. 

He reminds us the film is a film. Thus he runs end-credits in the middle, as if Cheney’s story/life (and the film) stops at his retreat from politics into Haliburton. 

Even more dramatic, his Dick and Lynne perform a Shakespearean, indeed Macbethean, dialogue on a married couple’s lust for power. This right after the film’s narrator has said he/we have no way of knowing what the Cheneys were thinking and saying between themselves at the time. This openly privileges story over history. It reminds us we’re watching a constructed story not real life.

That’s also the point of the later interruption of the real end-credits. A focus group breaks into a fight over the political bias of this film. These are the facts, one man insists, only to be rejected as a libtard by the Trumpist. By definition, both are right. The key point is that here McKay states that he is telling the Cheney story to express his own current political perspective.

That also explains Kurt, the narrative voice the film uses and occasionally shows. He’s a veteran of the Afghanistan war, now living a working class life in Cheney’s America. He’s the victim of the Haliburton government. Not till the end is he identified —the man whose heart is transplanted to save Cheney’s life.  
       Speaking from the grave — as the Founding Fathers do if we respect the Constitution — Kurt is hurt that Cheney refers to Kurt’s heart as his own. Cheney doesn’t respect this donor any more than he respects the workers and soldiers, always preferring the  Haliburton class. Denying the heart of the American constitution — as Cheney here and Trump outside do — betrays an absolute lack of heart in considering the rights and liberties America’s founding vision promised.