Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)

 

Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)

Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Lily Rabe, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Tyler Perry. Screenplay: Adam McKay. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Hank Corwin. Music: Nicholas Britell.

Vice got me to thinking that maybe Hannah Arendt got it wrong: It’s not the banality of evil but the mediocrity of evil. Dick Cheney, at least as Adam McKay’s screenplay and Christian Bale’s performance present him, was initially a vehicle for the varying ambitions of others: his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), and George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell). Cheney was like a liquid that flowed into the channels they provided him, helping create the Republican Party that would be shaped into its current form by Fox News and Donald Trump. Bale portrays Cheney as the silent menace we know from newsreels, ready to snap at any plausible idea, from redefining presidential power to making war on Saddam Hussein to sanctioning torture. But he begins as something of a naïf, not even sure which party he belongs to, and even asking Rumsfeld what the Republicans are for, which provokes gales of laughter from Rumsfeld. The problem with McKay’s film, however, is that despite Bale’s remarkable performance, Vice is overlong and confused, wavering from straight behind-the-headlines dramatization to satiric bits like a waiter (a cameo by Alfred Molina) serving up Republican agenda items to a tableful of fat cats. The narrative is chopped up with flashbacks and time jumps, and even includes an occasional narrator named Kurt (Jesse Plemons), whose identity is withheld for most of the film to provide a small but essentially pointless surprise. There’s even a bit in the middle of the final credits, in which a contemporary focus group comes to blows over the film's “political bias.” I share McKay’s obvious bias, but I wish he didn’t wear it so proudly.

This Is the Way the World Ends

Movie: Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) (Netflix).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Holiday Wars: Champion Cake Off (Food Network); Landscapers: Episode Four (HBO Max); Station Eleven: Hurricane (HBO Max). 

If a couple of friends whose taste I trust hadn't praised Don't Look Up I might not have watched it. My local newspaper critic gave it a rave and even put it on his top ten list for the year, but he and I don't always see eye to eye, and his opinion of Adam McKay's film was out of the mainstream. Don't Look Up currently has a 55% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative critics used words like "leaden," "sluggish," "slapdash," "smug," "bombastic," "frantic," "laborious," "toothless," "messy," "smarmy," and even "disastrous" to describe it. Several compared it unfavorably to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 similarly apocalyptic satire Dr. Strangelove. But this time audiences seem to be out of step with the critics: Not only did my friends praise it, but negative reviews like Peter Bradshaw's in The Guardian have been met with a barrage of online comments from people who thought the movie was brilliantly effective in its satire on the Trump era, social media, capitalistic excess, and journalistic ineptness. The movie also made the top position in viewership on Netflix, contradicting George S. Kaufman's observation that "satire is what closes on Saturday night" -- i.e., after opening on Friday. Okay, I enjoyed it, too, especially Meryl Streep's take on what Donald Trump would be like if he were a woman, and Jonah Hill's merciless parody of Donald Jr. I don't think it's the best film of this or any other year, but it hits the mark more often than not. I'm one who doesn't wholeheartedly worship Dr. Strangelove, for the reason I set forth on this blog: "It may be that reality has outstripped satire. Who could have invented Donald Trump?" All too often, our public figures, our politicians, our business leaders, our media darlings seem to be satirizing themselves. Who could have invented Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, or Tucker Carlson, either? Who could have foreseen a time when people would be taking horse dewormer for a viral plague and calling for the head of Dr. Fauci? I credit McKay with a lot of insight and wit in even daring to take our common plight and sink his teeth into it.

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)

Landscapers ended last night with its characteristic surreal embroidery on the crime of Susan and Christopher Edwards, imagining the two, as they sat on trial for murdering her parents, as characters in a Western movie -- an echo of their love of films like High Noon. I appreciated the series' attempt to go beyond a mere restaging of the crime and the trial, and the work of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis in portraying the couple, but I'm not sure the story demanded four hour-long episodes.

Station Eleven made another switch in time and place to tell the story of Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) and her affair with Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) at the onset of the pandemic. I don't know how the episode links with the first two (except for Arthur's death in the first one), or what Miranda's graphic novel has to do with anything (I expect a lot), or even why the episode is called "Hurricane," but I intend to stay tuned to find out. 

The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015)

Christian Bale in The Big Short

I will never come closer to understanding Wall Street than I do after watching this film -- but that's about as close as I am to understanding particle physics. It's a remarkable portrayal of what the kind of manipulations that led to the crash of 2008 can do to people, and in this case to the people who helped bring it about. I have seen what that crash -- and the manipulations -- can do to ordinary folk: I live in a condo that's part of a series of small duplexes, each unit of which is only a little over a thousand square feet. A few years before the crash, the unit that adjoined mine was bought by a Mexican-American man who worked as a gardener at Stanford. It was, he explained, a starter home for him and his wife and five (!) daughters. It was soon evident that he was having trouble making the payments on the mortgage -- at one point, the family moved out and rented it to someone else for a while. Eventually, the bank foreclosed. I wondered at the time how he had managed to secure a mortgage in the first place. After the crash, I found out why -- a process that is at the heart of what takes place in The Big Short. There are no heroes or villains in this movie: Even the protagonists with whom we are asked to identify, such as Michael Burry (Christian Bale) and Mark Baum (Steve Carell), are out to milk a system they know is corrupt. And when they fail, they still manage to make a billion dollars, mostly by using other people's money. But the characters are so shrewdly drawn, first by Michael Lewis in his book and then by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph in their Oscar-winning screenplay, and so deftly acted that we can't help feeling for them. Some of them, like Burry and Baum and Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt in one of his best performances), seem to have a touch of Asperger's. Movies like Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) and The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) have given us portrayals of America's financial system as dominated by flamboyant greed-heads like Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort, but The Big Short shows us something even more disturbing: the moral corruption of exceptionally intelligent men whose lives could have been put to something more useful than playing with money as if it were a board game with no real consequences to other people.

Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015)

Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd in Ant-Man

Scott Lang/Ant-Man: Paul Rudd
Dr. Hank Pym: Michael Douglas
Hope van Dyne: Evangeline Lilly
Darren Cross/Yellowjacket: Corey Stoll
Paxton: Bobby Canavale
Sam Wilson/Falcon: Anthony Mackie

Director: Peyton Reed
Screenplay: Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd
Based on the comics by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby
Cinematography: Russell Carpenter
Production design: Shepherd Frankel
Film editing: Dan Lebenthal, Colby Parker Jr.
Music: Christophe Beck

The main reason to see Ant-Man is Paul Rudd, once again proving that casting is the chief thing Marvel has going for it in its efforts to capture the comic-book movie world. Like Robert Downey Jr. in the various Iron Man and Avengers movies, or Chris Pratt in his leap to superstardom in Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014), Rudd has precisely the right tongue-in-cheekiness to bring off a preposterous role, one that the end credits assure us he will be playing again. Rudd, whose quick wit is known from his talk show appearances, also had a hand in the screenplay, which was begun by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish and revised and finished by Rudd and Adam McKay. For once, a comic book film is better before the CGI flash-and-dazzle take over -- the concluding portion of the film is a bit of a muddle, considering that most of the performers in the action sequences are ants. Indeed, the most impressive special effects in the movie are not the action sequences but the "youthening" of Michael Douglas, who is first seen as the much younger Hank Pym in 1989, looking much as he did in The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989), one of the films used by the special effects artists as reference. On the other hand, it has to be said here that Rudd doesn't look much older than he did 21 years ago in Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995).