An earlier version of this review stated that Dick Cheney earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. Cheney earned a master’s degree and left before finishing his PhD. This version has been corrected.
‘The World According to Dick Cheney’: A too-polite form of interrogation
David Stubbs/Showtime -
”The World According to Dick Cheney” fails to shed any real light on the former vice president.
At first, “The World According to Dick Cheney” behaves like a biography, taking us to Wyoming in the 1950s, where young Dick grows up in an idyllic West. He flunks out of Yale, returns home to blue-collar jobs and a couple of drunken-driving arrests. His fiancee, Lynne Vincent, issues a straighten-up-and-fly-right ultimatum (not unlike the one Laura Bush once issued to her husband), and this seems to propel Cheney to larger ambitions.
A remarkable turnaround follows over the next decade or so, in which Cheney almost earns a PhD in political science (while deferring the Vietnam draft until he ages out of it, which goes unmentioned here, as does the fact that he didn’t complete his doctorate), moves to Washington, works for and befriends Donald Rumsfeld, survives the Nixon White House and becomes President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff while still in his early 30s. Cheney then spends a decade in Congress; President George H.W. Bush appoints him defense secretary in 1989; then there’s the Persian Gulf War in 1991 . . .
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
I know most of you know all this, but it seems Cutler doesn’t know that most of you know all this. As it loses steam, “The World According to Dick Cheney” forgets that it’s supposed to be a movie and not the bullet points in a man’s résumé. Lynne Cheney is hardly anywhere to be found (a real loss in terms of humanizing backstory and an engaging talker), and there is no mention of Cheney as the father who bucked GOP tradition to publicly support his daughter Mary’s same-sex relationship rights. The fishing trip we see is purely for the camera’s benefit, and there is no color or candidness to be had here, no narrative flow, and nothing to learn that we can’t look up or recall on our own. Cutler doesn’t even ask about the 2006 hunting incident.
Like all documentaries that are essentially contemporary biographies, there is a small industry of journalists, book writers, think-tankers and former associates who supply a drop or two of the necessary sauce. Together, they sketch a portrait we’ve seen before, that of the obstinate master manipulator holed away in the undisclosed location. Nothing says that better than the carefully selected news clips and Sunday-morning talk show sequences — plenty to go around — in which Cheney and company assert broader power and insist that Saddam Hussein is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.
None of this looks old enough yet to entice us to take a short trip in the time machine. It’s hard to imagine who will watch “The World According to Dick Cheney” and come away satisfied or newly informed; even those prone to froth angrily at the mere mention of Cheney’s name will have to work extra hard to get outraged all over again. That era is still cooking — and still raw in the center. Cutler indeed got his interview, but he’s serving it at least a decade too soon.
The World According to Dick Cheney
(110 minutes) premieres at 9 p.m. Friday on Showtime, with encores.
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