Vice

dir. Adam McKay · 2018

Snapshot

Adam McKay's Vice is a formally restless political satire-biography tracing Dick Cheney's ascent from Wyoming drifter to the most consequential—and, McKay argues, most dangerous—Vice President in American history. The film opens on Cheney's early life as a Yale dropout and heavy drinker, pivots through his apprenticeship under Donald Rumsfeld in the Ford White House, and culminates in the post-9/11 period when he used the Unitary Executive Theory to consolidate extraordinary executive power, authorize enhanced interrogation, and drive the case for the Iraq War. Formally, Vice refuses the conventions of the prestige biopic: it interrupts its own narrative with a fake ending, stages scenes as Shakespearean soliloquy, inserts nature-documentary footage as ironic commentary, and presents a narrator whose relationship to Cheney is only revealed as a plot twist. The film is simultaneously a character study of unnerving depth—anchored by Christian Bale's transformative performance—and a polemical essay on the mechanics of American political power.

Industry & production

Vice was produced by Plan B Entertainment (Brad Pitt's company, which had co-produced The Big Short), Annapurna Pictures, and McKay's own Gary Sanchez Productions, with Annapurna and Roadside Attractions handling distribution. The film's production history reflects the consolidation of prestige independent production around a small number of well-capitalized boutique companies willing to fund provocative political material at mid-budget scale. Annapurna, founded by Megan Ellison, had by 2018 established itself as the primary institutional home for ambitious, uncommercial filmmaking in Hollywood, backing work by Paul Thomas Anderson, Kathryn Bigelow, and Spike Jonze before partnering with McKay.

The budget, reported in the range of approximately $60 million, placed Vice in the upper tier of Annapurna's output and required Christian Bale's above-the-title commitment to secure financing. Bale gained approximately 45 pounds for the role—following his weight loss for The Machinist and his physical transformation for Batman Begins—making his casting both a performance and a marketing proposition. The film opened wide on Christmas Day 2018, a traditional prestige release slot, and earned approximately $76 million worldwide, a figure that represented a significant underperformance relative to studio hopes but was consistent with the limited commercial ceiling of politically contentious material. It collected eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Amy Adams), Best Supporting Actor (Sam Rockwell), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing, ultimately winning only Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Technology

Vice was shot by cinematographer Greig Fraser on a combination of film and digital formats, a deliberate choice that allowed the film to modulate texture in service of its shifting registers—from the glossy, over-exposed look of contemporary political imagery to grainier, news-reel-adjacent footage that approximates documentary authenticity. Fraser's team also worked extensively with archival television footage, integrating it into the film's visual vocabulary in a way that blurs the boundary between reconstruction and document. The prosthetic and makeup work—recognized by the Academy—was conducted by Kazu Hiro (credited as Kazuhiro Tsuji), who had previously created transformative prosthetic applications for Darkest Hour (2017). The degree of physical alteration required for Bale's Cheney, Sam Rockwell's Bush, and Steve Carell's Rumsfeld involved extensive prosthetic construction, making Vice one of the more technically ambitious makeup projects of its era.

Technique

Cinematography

Greig Fraser's work on Vice is deliberately unstable—a visual strategy that matches McKay's refusal of documentary authority. The film moves between formats and aspect ratios with rhetorical intent: the contemporary political sequences often have the flat, broadcast-television overexposure of cable news, while the 1970s Ford-era passages carry a warmer, filmic grain. Fraser employs handheld camera during moments of political crisis and chaotic decision-making, and a more composed, almost classical framing when staging the Cheneys in domestic spaces—a visual binary that sets public turbulence against private legibility. The film also draws on the grammar of the nature documentary, with insert shots of predatory animals that operate as visual editorializing. Fraser's career at the time of Vice—he had shot Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Foxcatcher (2014), and Lion (2016)—was marked by an ability to move between austere realism and more expressive registers, a range fully exploited here.

Editing

Hank Corwin, who had previously worked with McKay on The Big Short and before that spent decades as Oliver Stone's primary editor (including JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon), brings to Vice an associative, maximalist montage practice. The editing is the film's most formally aggressive element. Corwin cuts freely between dramatic reconstruction, archival news footage, political speech recordings, nature-documentary inserts, and title cards in a mode that owes something to Stone's essay-montage but pushes further into self-conscious absurdism. The film's most audacious editorial gesture is the false ending: approximately halfway through, when Cheney chooses not to run for president in 2000, a closing-credits sequence begins—only for the narrative to resume when George W. Bush recruits Cheney as his running mate. The choice reads simultaneously as a joke about genre expectations and a thesis statement about contingency, implying that the Cheney-as-VP story was not inevitable, and that the subsequent catastrophes flowed from a single decision.

Mise-en-scène / staging

McKay's staging alternates between two poles. The first is a kind of exaggerated naturalism—particularly in the domestic scenes between Dick and Lynne Cheney, staged with an intimacy that grants them interiority the film simultaneously undermines through ironic framing. The second is explicitly theatrical: the most celebrated staging choice is a scene in which Dick and Lynne speak to each other in blank verse, parodying Shakespeare's history plays, specifically the collusion scenes from Macbeth. The sequence is played deadpan by Bale and Adams and functions as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt—a deliberate rupture in illusionism that signals the film's consciousness of its own constructedness. This Brechtian impulse runs throughout: the narrator addresses the camera directly; title cards explain legal and political concepts; the machinery of representation is never fully concealed.

Sound

Nicholas Britell's score for Vice draws on his established practice of what he has called "broken music"—melodic and harmonic material subjected to distortion, tempo manipulation, and tonal ambiguity. Having scored Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), Britell brought to Vice a sensibility attuned to the gap between surface emotion and underlying dread. The score oscillates between grandiloquent, almost pompous orchestral passages—mimicking the self-congratulatory aesthetics of political power—and more dissonant, destabilizing undercurrents. The film also uses source music strategically, including country music and period-appropriate radio and television audio to anchor its historical passages.

Performance

Christian Bale's performance is the film's commercial and critical center of gravity. Beyond the obvious physical transformation, Bale constructs Cheney from the inside out: the voice, flattened to a near-expressionless register; the stillness, which reads as either self-containment or vacancy; the moments of genuine warmth toward his daughter Mary, which the film uses to establish that Cheney is not a cartoon but a person who chose. Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney delivers what many critics considered the film's most quietly devastating performance—Lynne is cast as the Lady Macbeth figure, the ambition-driver behind Dick's rise, and Adams plays the role with a controlled, chilling resolve. Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush is broadly performed but intentionally so; he is a study in incuriosity and manipulation, not a rounded character. Steve Carell's Rumsfeld is played as a kind of manic id, an older model of Washington cynicism who initiates the young Cheney into the logic of power for its own sake. Jesse Plemons as the narrator Kurt gives the film its most overtly fictional and emotionally strange anchor.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Vice is a satirical biopic organized around a revisionist historical thesis: that Dick Cheney, not George W. Bush, was the operational center of the post-9/11 executive, and that the expansion of presidential power during that period was deliberate, legally architected, and personally driven. The film's narrative mode is essayistic—it does not trust its dramatic scenes to carry argument without supplemental editorializing through title cards, direct address, and montage. This is a formally honest position: McKay is not pretending to offer a balanced portrait or a fully documented account, but an argument with a point of view, staged in the grammar of cinema rather than journalism. The narrator conceit—in which the narrator eventually reveals himself to be a man who received Cheney's discarded heart in a transplant—is the film's most overtly absurdist gesture, rendering the entire preceding narrative as retrospectively coloured by an impossible relationship of literal bodily connection between narrator and subject.

Genre & cycle

Vice belongs to a cycle of politically engaged American docudramas that intensified in the mid-2010s, including Spotlight (2015), The Big Short (2015), The Post (2017), and Dark Waters (2019). Within that cycle, Vice and The Big Short occupy a specific sub-category: the polemical essay-film masquerading as entertainment, in which formal experimentation is in the service of explicit political argument. The lineage behind this mode reaches back to Oliver Stone's conspiracy biopics—JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995)—and further to the New Hollywood tradition of formally adventurous political filmmaking. McKay's distinctly contemporary contribution is to graft the reflexive energy of late-network television satire (specifically, the sensibility of Saturday Night Live and its alumni) onto the political biopic, producing something that feels simultaneously more populist and more aggressively constructed than its predecessors. The film is also part of a broader cultural moment of Trump-era documentary and docudrama production in which the formal limits of traditional journalism seemed inadequate to the scale of the events being described.

Authorship & method

Adam McKay began his career as a writer and director at Saturday Night Live before transitioning to broad studio comedies (Anchorman, Step Brothers, The Other Guys). His pivot to politically charged docudrama with The Big Short (2015) marked a decisive authorial shift. McKay has spoken extensively about his political radicalization in the years after the 2008 financial crisis as the animating impulse behind this shift. His method is collaborative and fast-moving: he writes his own scripts, works closely with his editors (Corwin on both The Big Short and Vice), and tends to use a large ensemble cast whose performances he shapes through improvisation and multiple takes. Greig Fraser, as cinematographer, was a crucial collaborator in establishing Vice's visual grammar; Fraser's background in both genre and documentary-inflected work made him well suited to the film's tonal range. Nicholas Britell, whose scoring work had become identified with emotionally complex, formally adventurous American films of the period, brought a musical intelligence that complemented McKay's tendency toward ironic juxtaposition.

Movement / national cinema

Vice is firmly situated in American prestige independent cinema of the late 2010s, a category defined less by low budgets than by a particular institutional ecology: production through boutique companies (Annapurna, A24, Plan B), distribution through specialty arms or indie labels, and a target audience defined by cultural capital rather than demographic. Within that movement, the film is notable for its explicit political ambition—most prestige independent cinema of the period exercised political caution even when addressing political subjects. Vice is unabashedly partisan, and was received as such, which accounts for both its awards success with certain branches of the Academy and its polarized critical and audience reception.

Era / period

The film spans approximately 1963 to the late 2000s, with primary focus on the period 1968–2008, encompassing Cheney's apprenticeship in the Nixon-Ford era, his years as a Wyoming congressman, his tenure as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush during the Gulf War, his decade in the private sector at Halliburton, and his Vice Presidency under George W. Bush. The film was produced and released in 2018, during the Trump presidency, a context that saturates its reception: audiences and critics inevitably read Vice as a prehistory of the current moment, tracing the intellectual and legal architecture of executive overreach to the Cheney years. McKay has confirmed in interviews that the film is intended in part as an autopsy of how the American right arrived at Trumpism, though Trump does not appear in the film.

Themes

Power and its concealment are Vice's central preoccupations: the film is fascinated by how power is accumulated through procedural and legal means rather than dramatic confrontation, and how its most effective practitioners are those who appear, like Cheney, to want nothing for themselves. The Unitary Executive Theory—the legal doctrine holding that the President (and by extension the Vice President) has nearly unlimited authority over the executive branch—is presented as the ideological key to understanding the Cheney era: a theory that existed in conservative legal circles for decades before being operationalized in the post-9/11 emergency. The film also engages the theme of marriage as political partnership, rendering the Cheney relationship as a genuine bond that is also a collaboration in the pursuit of power. A third theme, handled with some ambiguity, concerns Cheney's relationship to his lesbian daughter Mary and his eventual public support of same-sex marriage—a humanizing strand that the film simultaneously credits and contextualizes against the political damage his administration's anti-gay positions caused.

Reception, canon & influence

Backward influences. The film draws extensively from Oliver Stone's political biopics, particularly Nixon (1995), which established the template for a psychologically revisionist portrait of a right-wing president that is simultaneously a critique of institutional power and an exercise in dramatic sympathy. The Brechtian theatrical devices—direct address, interpolated commentary, the visible machinery of production—connect Vice to a longer tradition of political theater, including the work of Joan Littlewood and the Living Newspaper tradition of the 1930s Federal Theatre Project. McKay's specific blend of comedy and political argument owes something to the satirical documentary tradition of Michael Moore, though McKay disavows the first-person mode and prefers formal experimentation to polemical confrontation. The Big Short is the most immediate formal precursor, establishing the specific grammar—narrator as explainer, celebrity cameos as pedagogical devices, genre ruptures—that Vice extends.

Critical reception. The film was one of the more divisively received prestige productions of 2018. Admirers argued that McKay had found the only formally adequate response to the Cheney story—that a conventional biopic would have domesticated its subject and rendered him pitiable rather than dangerous. Critics of the film, including several prominent reviewers, argued that the formal pyrotechnics served as a substitute for genuine psychological investigation, that the film's Cheney was a cartoon rather than a person, and that the political thesis was too simple to justify the satirical apparatus. The film received a notably low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes relative to its critical score, a pattern that reflected the partisan nature of its reception: audiences with sympathetic views of Cheney or the Bush administration largely rejected it as propaganda.

Forward influence. Vice is a significant reference point for the subsequent development of politically engaged American docudrama, particularly McKay's own Don't Look Up (2021), which pushed the satirical essay-film form further toward explicit allegory. The film also contributed to a broader conversation about the limits of liberal political cinema—whether formal sophistication can substitute for political analysis, and whether films can produce political effects in a fragmented media environment. Greig Fraser's work on Vice contributed to his rising stature as one of the defining cinematographers of his generation; he subsequently shot Dune (2021) and The Batman (2022), winning the Academy Award for Dune. Christian Bale's performance extended his reputation as one of the most technically committed actors of his era, though the role did not produce the Oscar recognition that Bale and McKay anticipated. The film remains, in the early 2020s, a contested object: a genuine formal experiment whose political argument has become, for some viewers, more rather than less pertinent as the Cheney-era legal architecture has continued to shape American executive power.