First best scene: When Scooter Libby gives the newly settled in eponymous running mate’s close retinue the lay of the land. The man took the fall later on for a sad abuse of presidential security clearance power, but he was seemingly as powerful as the movie explains Vice to have been in the Bush II White House. There’s a winding energy of setting the board of a high stakes game the scene oozes.
Second best scene is more a clip: When the narrator clarifies that, sadly (sadness of fact and state of things permeates this movie, which is sad), the Hussein spawn brothers really only cared about cocaine and Hollywood movies from the 80s — as the camera tracks across the rubble of their bombed palace-tomb peppered with VHS tapes.
McKay is a contemporary treasure of American cinema. He writes sharply, edits just as so, and is a top three assembler of today’s best thespians. I would love to read and see what him and Sorkin come up with if locked in a cabin with a strong internet connection for six months.
There’s narrative exposition, whereby explanations are embedded, and there’s straight up break the fourth wall, like you’re in a college class where you watch a lot of dramatizations and the professor interrupts every so often to note significance or clarify. Adam McKay does away with the former and laces the latter in expertly.
John Yoo makes an appearance, but the permanence and rigor of his arguments are wrongly emphasized — more defeatable by newer memos that make crafty interpretation of Yoo’s and previous law, constitutional and otherwise? Yes they are a sad record of the legal doctorings of the highest office of the state, but they aren’t indelibly carved in stone.
I got the recurring feeling that the audience is the filmmaker’s real target of ridicule — at least its members born before 1992. McKay flashes clips of what idiotic television property you were probably watching while Cheney, and the hawkish cabal fluttering about in the film, were carving out more and more power for the executive, the return on which was ultimate for so many.
Which reminds me of the saddest of all the sad reminders or realizations for the viewer of this artful biography, and most important moment of the film: That everything wrong with the state of our nation today traces back to the demise of the fairness in news broadcasting doctrine — established after the second great war, at the onset of television news broadcasting — in the 1980s.
As a result of unfettered media babel, on the broad shoulders of freedom of speech, for the presumed equal good of marketers, spokespersons, viewers, and consumers, we got zonked by the networks, culminating today in what you find more important in Bravo TV than in balanced coverage of the state of American healthcare, or asymmetric wars in Africa.
And so an interpretation of McKay’s storytelling is that Cheney being the shark from Jaws is a fact of the heavily populated world, a man walking the earth, or beating his main fin, in the direction of the White House. But this social-cultural circumstance is what allows history to take the course it took. This fact of communications policy making helped the main character pursue his course, determinatively, unfettered as the media sovereigns.
If there’s one valuable lesson to be garnered it’s related to his character however. Actually Kyle Russell reminded me of it randomly on Twitter, in noting the ultimate lesson of a Michael Lewis book about Wall Street traders he read last year:
Technical insights come from a deep understanding of the rules you’re playing by.
Throughout, understanding and dissecting the rules by which he and his office can operate, is how Cheney ascends to power.
The attaché case Cheney carries around everywhere, a bug-out pack of documents that establishes his authority in any room, made me think of POTUS45’s little index card with bullet points in big block Sharpie.
Oh, and sound editing awards should go to whomever appropriate here, based alone on the capture of the sound of Veep Cheney’s gentle, carefree bite into a morning Danish — scrumptious.
Is it better than Miami Vice, I don’t know because they’re different, but it’s an important story about America in the early early twenty-first century, told through the exploits, both sporadic and deliberate, of a man and a woman, who saw life as a challenge to accomplish by taking, and without remorse.
