Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney is a remarkable piece of impersonation, heavy, quiet and watchful, and Adam McKay builds around it a film so busy telling us what to think that it never finds out what the man thought. Funny in bursts, wearying by the end.
Adam McKay’s film about Dick Cheney opens with a caption admitting that its subject is one of the most secretive men in American history and that the film has done its best. That best runs 132 minutes, carries a 15 certificate, and uses every device McKay tried in The Big Short (2015) and a few he did not: a narrator, freeze frames, cutaways to fishing lures and a beating heart, captions that argue with the pictures. At the centre of it, saying almost nothing, is Christian Bale, and he is the reason to see it.
Bale plays Cheney heavy, bald and slow, talking out of one side of his mouth in a voice that never rises. He does not do a turn. He plays a man who has noticed that nobody watches the quiet one, and uses it. His best moments are the ones in which nothing happens: Cheney at the back of a room, Cheney listening to a phone, Cheney deciding in silence to want something. Amy Adams gives Lynne the ambition her husband has to be lent, and their early scenes in Wyoming, with the future laid out across a kitchen table, are the film’s most honest drama.
Steve Carell’s Rumsfeld is a grinning bully who laughs out loud when the young Cheney asks him what they believe in. Bill Camp is a decent, harassed Gerald Ford. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush as an amiable man eating fried chicken while giving away the store, and we laughed, then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because the joke depends on our already having decided he was a fool, and the film never checks whether we have. Alison Pill and Lily Rabe, as the daughters Mary and Liz, are the one place the script finds something the public record does not already say, and it saves them for last and handles them with a quiet the rest of the film does not have.
The craft is real. Greig Fraser shoots the Nixon and Ford years in dun browns and fluorescent office light, so that power looks like a corridor with a carpet. Patrice Vermette dresses the White House as a run of small, over-furnished rooms. Susan Matheson keeps Cheney in the same boxy suit across four decades and lets his body change inside it. Nicholas Britell’s score is the film’s wittiest element, martial brass played a little too grandly for whatever is on screen, and it does more satire on its own than any of the captions.
Hank Corwin’s editing is where the argument happens, and where the trouble is. Corwin cuts a Cheney handshake to a fish taking a hook, a legal memo to a heart pumping, a cabinet meeting to a river in Wyoming, and for half an hour this is exciting. Then it does not stop. Every time Bale has built a silence, the film cuts away to explain what the silence meant. By the second hour we were watching a lecture with a very good actor in the corner of the frame, and we were angry, partly at Cheney, as intended, and partly at a film that would not trust us to get there on our own.
The unitary executive theory, the idea that a president may do anything he decides is within his office, is explained twice, once as a comic sketch and once in text on screen. The Iraq invasion, the camps and the torture memos arrive as a montage of headlines. Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk and LisaGay Hamilton, as Wolfowitz, Libby and Rice, each get a scene in which to look shifty or worried. None of this is untrue; almost none of it is dramatised.
The Big Short worked because its subject was a system and the sketches were the only way in. Cheney is a man, and the film could have gone and looked at him. McKay is so sure of what he would find that he never does, and Bale, who plainly did the looking, spends the film answering questions his director keeps interrupting. It is worth an evening for him and for Adams. Watch it at home, where you can pause on the captions and let the performance breathe, which the cut never does.
