So, Dick Cheney, who the hell were you? What was that all about? As we enter another era, which makes the bogeymen of yesterday look like ‘maybe they weren’t so bad after all’, we’re left wondering. George W, who features heavily in a great performance by Sam Rockwell, (Vice is full of impressive performances, Bale’s being the icing on the cake), has been heavily rehabilitated in recent years. All of a sudden he isn’t the man who rushed headlong to war at the first opportunity, but a down-to-earth fellow who knows how to talk to his fellow americans and just happened to be president. Which is more or less how he’s played in McKay’s film, which makes it very clear that Cheney was the power behind the throne. Of course, this is the danger with revisionist history, something that has long afflicted Peter Morgan and is now occurring with James Graham in the UK: they turn men and women whose actions caused incalculable political and social damage into someone who might have walked out of a soap opera. We’re not much the wiser at the end of Vice as to what made Cheney tick. He doesn’t seem such a bad soul, and perhaps he wasn’t, but it’s the ‘perhaps he was’ that seems more important to me. The film tries to square its ends by putting titles at the conclusion giving figures for fatalities in the Iraq war, but this doesn’t really make up for the fact McKay soft soaps his role in Haliburton, and the personal gain he and his family levered as a result of the war. Because this is the heart of corruption, and it should be acknowledged that all political systems are always liable to corruption: who gains? It’s far easier to take ‘difficult epoch making decisions’ when you know they’re in your own personal interest. Vice lets Cheney off the hook here, in spite of the nice arty sequence of fish hooks at the end.
It’s the risk that McKay’s film-making takes. The jokey backhanders and the explicative, tongue-in-cheek subtitling. Personally, I rate him and respect him for getting movies made about big topics that need talking about. But having said that, Vice feels as though it bites off more than it can chew. It might have been far more effective if, rather than becoming a biopic, it had really given itself time to pick apart at the seams the reality of those days pre-and-post-911, pinning down the subject’s motives with greater clarity. Asking a few harder questions. And offering answers which were less easy to brush off.
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Regarding this last point, it’s perhaps worth addressing the Shakespeare correlative. Someone else who wrote political drama, and could obviously be used as a reference by the likes of Morgan, Graham and Mckay. There are two significant points to take on board here. One is that Shakespeare’s editorial line never fudges things. Richard 3, Richard 2, Henry 4, Henry 5: the virtues and faults of these characters are very clearly delineated, there’s no sitting on the fence (as opposed to the treatment of his tragic heroes, for example). And secondly it should be noted that Shakespeare never commented explicitly on contemporary politics. The closest he got was Henry 8. Perhaps because it was too dangerous or perhaps because he decided that it wasn’t the dramatist’s role to attempt to re-present the events of the day. In the relatively new fashion for re-presenting contemporary history, (docu-fiction), there’s always the suspicion that there’s a tendency to oversimplify, to paint with a brush that doesn’t allow for the subtlety of fine detail, detail which history will provide. There’s something which feels dangerously opportunistic and cosy about Graham’s depiction of Cummings, for example. Perhaps Brecht’s Arturo Ui is also relevant here. The “balance” demanded by docu-fiction is just as dangerous as the “balance” which contemporary broadcasters seem to believe necessary, without ever realising that the “balance” they provide is skewered by the fact that the theoretically neutral position adopted to arbitrate this balance is never actually neutral, is always the product of a system with its own interests.
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