Watching: Vice

[white_hart]

We're still managing a film a week as the Oscar hopefuls stack up. This time it was Adam MacKay's Vice, a darkly comic biopic of former US Vice President Dick Cheney. Vice mixes docudrama, vintage news clips, a voiceover narrative with a twist and occasional flights of fantasy (such as the moment when Cheney and his wife switch into mock-Shakespearean iambic pentameter) to build up a portrait of an ambitious man engaged in a ruthless pursuit of power, regardless of the devastating impact his actions have on the wider world (MacKay's film blames Cheney for, among others, the rise of Fox News and ISIS). It's (obviously) not a cheerful film, but it is a very good film and an interesting insight into recent US political history, which I know less about that I probably should (I had had no idea that Donald Rumsfeld had held office under Nixon and Ford before popping up as the stream-of-consciousness soundbite guy in the Bush 2 administration, just for starters). Christian Bale and Amy Adams are both terrific as Cheney and his wife Lynne, and Sam Rockwell does an excellent impression of George W Bush.