R.J. Cutler’s new documentary, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” finds the former vice president as resolute and indifferent as ever to his critics. What else did you expect — that the heart transplant would have magical effects? That he would have newfound doubts about his role in going to war against Iraq? That a little time and perspective would lead him to see the world any way other than the way he already sees it? If so, the joke’s still on you.
“I don’t go around thinking, ‘Gee, I wish we’d done this, or I wish I’d done that,’ ” Cheney says. “The world is as you find it, and you’ve got to deal with that. . . . You don’t get do-overs.” No regrets, no wishy-washiness. No duh. “I did what I did,” he says later, “and it’s all on the public record. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it in a minute.”
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
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The film, fresh from Sundance and having its television premiere Friday night on Showtime, is a sturdy but ultimately stifled exercise in the most polite methods of interrogation — to which its subject is entirely immovable and not prepared to surrender anything, even a smile. The lone artistic move in “The World According to Dick Cheney” is to hire actor Dennis Haysbert as narrator — the voice of Allstate insurance, presently, but, more important, the fictional president of the earliest seasons of Fox’s “24,” a show that absorbed some of our culture’s excess panic attacks about counterterrorism, torture and general millennial doom. Here, Haysbert’s voice is a nostalgic touch in a film that badly needs any help it can get to keep the viewer engaged.
Cutler, whose previous work includes “The War Room” (an unforgettable look at the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign) and “The September Issue” (a fascinating trip into Vogue magazine’s editorial process), patiently waited and wheedled for many months until Cheney agreed to sit for several hours of interviews. Cheney even let the crew come along on a Wyoming fishing trip, his first since a heart transplant last year. It’s a good get, but the results are probably not what anyone hoped.
So what are we doing here, for nearly two hours?
Mainly we are reciting large chunks of an unfinished Wikipedia entry on the 2000s, particularly the George W. Bush administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. This is a subject about which a number of questions and a lot of acrimony remain; in many ways, we are still living through (and very much in) a world according to Dick Cheney.
“Tell me what terrorist acts you would let go forward because you didn’t want to be a mean and nasty fella?” Cheney responds when Cutler gently questions how the administration pushed for war, altered privacy rights and tortured detainees.
Cutler’s impulse is easy to understand: Like all men and women who’ve had a front seat to history, it’s important to get Cheney to talk about what he’s seen and learned while he’s still around to share it. He’s 72 and noticeably aged since 2009, but he’s looking healthier and certainly slimmer than he did during his time as veep.
