VICE

VICE is an occasionally very funny film that contains a great performance. But it's also an overlong, baggy mess in which half of what the director throws at the film fails to stick. Even worse, it's a film that pretends to be as close to factual as possible, even while committing the cardinal mistake of painting Bush 43 as nice but stupid (he was neither).  And worst of all, it's a film that pretends to give us some kind of emotional truth about Cheney's loving home life while accusing him of being a venal power-hungry shit. This is all fine, so long as you don't then claim that what you're doing isn't partisan but "factual".  It's simply asinine for a movie director to claim that he's just showing us facts, when he's already admitted that much of what Cheney did is secret.  You can't claim that it's fact that Cheney did X or thought Y.  And to then throw in a mid-credits sequence that wants to cut off criticisms of the film as being nonsense, because it's factual.... well this is the worst kind of bullshit.

But anyway, there are many good performances in bad films.  Christian Bale's depiction of Dick Cheney is indeed a great performance and worth the ticket price. Unlike Rami Malek donning some fake teeth and an accent to play Freddie Mercury, Bale goes way beyond a mere impression (as perfect as his accent is).  In fact, it's pretty insulting to see both of these performances nominated for the same award.  Bale inhabits his character - gives him nuance, and depth, and a whole range of emotions. He has Cheney be a genuinely loyal steadfast father, a loving and proud husband, an almost absurdly slow-moving politician, but also a greedy, conniving, Machiavellian thinker.  When Bale's Cheney turns to the screen at the end of the film to address us, I utterly believed his apologia pro vita sua to be authentic and convincing.

Bale is matched in his endeavours by Amy Adams as his wife Lynne, but I'm pretty sick of two-dimensional Lady MacBeth characters and found little to really engage with.  I thoroughly enjoyed Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, but he's played, literally, for laughs. But Sam Rockwell looked like a Mad magazine version of W.  So yeah - this is pretty much a one-man show.

As for McKay, the gonzo collage style directing that made THE BIG SHORT so successful goes haywire in VICE.  This film is indulgent, over-long, bizarre, heavy-handed, bludgeoning. I get the fishing metaphor Adam! I don't need to continually cut back to a sinister looking fish moving through water or have end-credits of bait.  I also really think I'd rather not have you use Cheney's heart-transplant donor - a young dead veteran - mouth your script from beyond the grave. That's just distasteful.  Overall, I don't want to get my politics from Mad magazine, and that's what this film is. 

VICE has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R.  It was released last December in most global markets. It will play Berlin 2019.  

GONE GIRL

GONE GIRL isn’t as frightening or as visually inventive as David Fincher’s previous films. It doesn’t deliver that gut-punch head-fuck of brilliance that stays with you over repeated viewings. The movie, though technically accomplished, doesn’t push the envelope technically or strike one as self-consciously modern. Worse still, it’s a movie based on a bizarrely popular and intensely badly written thriller by Gillian Flynn - a book so bad at the sentence level I only forced myself to read it to inform this review. The poor quality source material hampers Fincher in two ways. First, even those who haven’t read the book probably know whodunnit and how. Second, even with all of Fincher’s intelligence brought to bear, there are certain leaps of faith and improbability that trouble the careful viewer.

For the very few out there who don’t know, however, GONE GIRL is a contemporary thriller centred on the married couple Nick and Amy Dunne. They fall in love and marry but years later they have descended into mutual dissatisfaction - something that we might at first believe is caused by financial difficulties after they both lose their jobs and move back to Missouri, making Amy a fish out of water. However, as book-readers will know, the conceit of the novel and film is that for the first half both Nick and X are unreliable narrators. It turns out that he is adulterous and selfish and that she has a history of seeking extravagantly worked out revenge on men who get in her way.

What carries this movie is the central performance of Rosamund Pike who has to play five shades of her character: the young girl who falls for the handsome writer; the disaffected and calculating housewife; the frumpy “gone girl” on the lam; the ultra-glamorous Sharon-Stone-esque murderer; and finally the icy cold but contained returned wife. At each stage, even thought we know what happens next, we are captivated by her narcissism, cruelty and slipperiness. It’s just plain impressive to see her alter her physicality and demeanour to encompass the roles.

Sadly everyone else in the film is just reflective paper for her to work off of. Affleck and Carrie Coons are credible and just fine as the twins upon whom the accusations of murder fall. Missi Pyle is just fine as the by now cinematic cliche of shamelessly ratings-seeking muck-raking journalist. And Tyler Perry is - well - himself. The most ill-used actor is however Neil Patrick Harris as Amy's obsessive high school boyfriend Desi. He’s just a cartoonish stalker in a classy suit. I mean, there was something melodramatically over the top and stupid about his final scenes, but was anyone still taking it seriously at that point? If so, only because of Rosamund Pike.

Ultimately, the film is worth watching. It’s compelling and well-made. Will it be remembered among Fincher’s cannon? No. It cannot surprise the rather thin and trite finger-pointing at the media and the decidedly implausible plot. But I guess at least Hollywood knows who to turn to when it comes to the inevitable BASIC INSTINCT remake.

GONE GIRL has a running time of 149 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.