“Vice” – A Cheney Biopic [updated 4/7/19]

Check out Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in this trailer for “Vice” that dropped today. This movie looks fantastic.

Chapters two and three of my first book, Takeover, were essentially an intellectual history of Cheney – why he had the views on executive power that he did, based on his previous life experiences – leading up to his ascent to power as the most influential vice president ever in Bush’s first term. You can read chapter two for free on this website, which gets you to the end of the Ford administration, when he was the youngest White House chief of staff in American history during the fallout from the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Church Committee investigation.

 

UPDATE APRIL 7, 2019: I finally got around to watching this movie last night and had a mixed reaction. It was well acted and stylistically excellent in that Adam McKay way, but various inaccuracies bothered me.

It was probably inevitable that any movie would get the Unitary Executive Theory wrong (it used that phrase as a synecdoche for Bush-Cheney executive- power legal theories). But there were also omissions and distortions — particularly about Cheney’s intellectual history and beliefs (it portrays him as having none) — that I thought were unjustified by the sacrifices necessary to dramatize/simplify real-life events into a two-hour movie: they just made Cheney’s story less interesting than the reality had been, without any such silver-lining virtues.

(A friend had warned me I would have that reaction, which is why I didn’t rush to see it in the theater but waited for it to be available by streaming.)

After watching the movie, I was reading this article in Esquire,  “Vice Tries to Examine Dick Cheney’s Heart, but Conveniently Overlooks His Brain,” by Zeeshan Aleem, and thinking to myself yeah exactly, and then clicked on a link the writer was citing to make one such point, to discover …yep, I guess I would think that, wouldn’t I.