Films look at war from inside and outside the halls of power
There are moments in "Vice," a forbidding portrait of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and "Leave No Trace," a parable of an Iraq vet trapped with his demons in the Oregon woods, when the travails of recent American history are compressed into how one man becomes a casualty in another's relentless pursuit of power.
"Vice" explores a post-9/11 White House where Cheney, President George W. Bush's scheming shadow, veers the nation into two misguided wars that helped instigate today's political enmity and cultural divisions. "Leave No Trace" gives us Will, a fictional metaphor for hundreds of thousands of American soldiers maimed physically and psychologically in the deserts of Iraq and the valleys of Afghanistan.
The films are bookends for a time that's passed but really hasn't. Cheney's quiet, methodical cunning to expand presidential powers and rouse conservatives with patriotism and fear of the other were a prelude to
