Watching movies -- "Vice"

"Vice" is not quite a comedy, not quite a drama. It is an essay. Writer-director Adam McKay's previous "The Big Short" came close to the essay form in its examination of financial malfeasance but it still had a more linear, dramatic structure than "Vice," which freely skips biographical chronology and segues into oddities -- a startling mid-film closing note and credits, a Shakespearean conversation, an Everyman narrator with a twist -- all to make a point about Dick Cheney's conscience-free pursuit and retention of power. At one point a still-young Cheney asks his friend Donald Rumsfeld what they believe; Rumsfeld laughs at the notion. And it's never suggested that Cheney has a real ideology save to have to freedom to do whatever the hell he wants.

An avid fisherman whose Secret Service code name was Angler, Cheney early on looked for the angles, and for the right bait to reel in his prey. He often did so as a seeming sidekick, for example to Rumsfeld, but with the willingness to kick aside anyone in his way. And he was stolid, reticent, especially when it came to drawing people into his net; one of the best sequences in the movie has George W. Bush wooing Cheney to be his running mate, intercut with images of a big fish that Cheney catches -- even though Bush plainly thinks he has caught Cheney.

Because Cheney has long been publicly taciturn, especially when it comes to his machinations (as the movie admits in an introductory note), Christian Bale as Cheney has a tough task -- letting us see both how shielded Cheney is and how he does have some emotional connections. Those are most evident in his dealing with his wife Lynne (Amy Adams), who forces him from a directionless life to success (only the movie's Lynne is nowhere near the monster the real one is) and with his daughters (though he eventually takes sides in a way that underscores his belief in power over principle  because, as I have said, power is his lone principle). In one scene, Bale turns the act of brushing his teeth into a contemplation of what he will and will not say, generating enormous tension -- and a little humor -- in a mundane moment McKay lets stretch agonizingly.

It's on others to show their feelings, to reflect Cheney: on Adams, on Steve Carell as Rumsfeld, on Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush, who sees Cheney as a man who can put him in the White House but never realizes the irony when Cheney urges Bush's actions with the assertion that "you're the President"; Bush may have the office, but Cheney has the system. And incredulous onlookers like Colin Powell (Tyler Perry) and Condoleezza Rice (LisaGay Hamilton) have no defense.

But what do we make of this as a movie? Consider it again not as an essay, a cinematic polemic, and you can see its effectiveness in how infuriating it is, whether because you hate all that Cheney has wrought (his heirs include Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society), or because you hate the dismantling he gets here. A postscript of sorts takes on that last point directly. Consider, too, how fine the cast is, how often McKay takes complex issues and makes them easily understood (as he did in "The Big Short") in entertaining ways. Think of the fish, and fear any future Anglers.