In the Loop

Director Armando Iannucci

IN THE LOOP             B+                

Great Britain  (106 mi)  2009 d:  Armando Iannucci

“Fuck off, Frodo.”  —Lt. General George Miller (James Gandolfini)

Given a sense from someone who’s been writing TV shows all his life, this first feature film is no different, as it has the feel of a free-wheeling, expletive-driven cable TV show, fueled by plenty of nonstop profanity that explode like bombs in and around the rooms of government with such frequency they may as well be heat-seeking missiles.  Without ever mentioning names, this adrenaline-laced political farce resembles the behind-the-scenes shenanigans in the Bush White House leading up to the Iraqi invasion, as no one wants to go on record as talking about an impending war, so they disguise every word they use with subterfuge, denying anything remotely resembling the truth while inventing theories or spreading false rumors to send reporters scurrying in the wrong direction.  Based on a British TV show The Thick of It, which uses a similar (the most foul-mouthed) main character and has been running since 2005, this film mixes the bumbling political operatives working on both sides of the ocean, both the British and the Americans, each more dysfunctional than the next.  Starting with Tom Hollander as Simon Foster, British Minister for International Development, a low level bureaucrat who doesn’t stand for anything, who’s always on the verge of standing for something, but when the cameras are rolling has a tendency to offer delectable sound bites that instantly pique the interest of the opposite shores.  When asked during a live BBC broadcast about impending war in the Middle East, Foster blurts out “war is unforeseeable,” a seemingly innocuous phrase that is immediately seized upon as a break from the Prime Minister’s views, where attack dog Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, from the TV show), communications director from the Prime Minister’s office, hurls the first of his series of neverending invectives to shut him up, as well as anyone else that stands in his way.  Tucker’s character is easily the most hilarious, as in typical John Cleese fashion, he never tires of inventing the most personalized profanity-laden insults ever hurled.  The phrase has already captured the attention of a liberal American cabinet assistant Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and her bright assistant, Anna Chlumsky, who actually authored a paper outlining the pros and cons of going to war, heavier on the reasons to avoid invasion.  A political firestorm ensues.

Foster, however, after getting thoroughly chewed out, in an attempt to backtrack and sound completely ambiguous, utters the phrase “Britain must be ready to climb the mountain of conflict,” which puts him at the center of the conflict and gets him an invite to a Congressional committee hearing room led by the Rumsfeld-like warmonger David Rasche playing state department secretary Linton Barwick, whose first order of business after the meeting is over is to officially change the notes from what was actually said to what he felt they intended to say.  Added into the mix is James Gandolfini as a Colin Powell-esque Lt. General Miller, who is adamantly against war, claiming:  ”Once you’ve been there, once you’ve seen it, you never want to go back unless you have to—like France,” using his intelligence sources just to find where the meeting was held, as it was disguised under a fictitious name.  Gandolfini can hurl the invectives as good as the next guy, so for awhile this feels like a testosterone heavy profanity contest, creating an entirely new language spoken behind closed doors in the halls of government.  While it is outrageously funny, the tone moves from manic to screwball comedy to farce, the one-liner zingers are uttered fast and furiously, where after awhile you reach a saturation point as it all starts to sound the same.  While there’s little actual politics in evidence, or any real discussion, instead everything takes place behind the scenes in an attempt to undermine, outmaneuver, or even annihilate the opposition, as it’s all about being top dog, forcing others to be subservient to you.  This is the role Barwick cherishes, even as he has no qualms using fabricated intelligence, which, for sheer idiocy, turns out to be a rewritten hack job of Chlumsky’s paper now advocating going to war, claiming this is classified British intelligence.  This film exposes the lunacy of this kind of secrecy and backstabbing, where they’re so busy falsifying evidence and bullying the opposition that the world of deceit and power is all they understand, not the one the rest of us live in. 

While this is obviously a satirical spoof, where the frenetic pace of the film is a nonstop charade of getting the jump on the next guy, continuously feeding others a pile of lies and misdirection, it’s also uttering only meaningless phrases on camera while maintaining an undetected secret agenda behind the scenes, spending one’s entire career mastering deceit, having no interest whatsoever in one’s constituency, as real people may not like what you’re doing.  Instead, this accurately describes how people invent the kind of world they live in, building a simulated parallel universe, one that is acceptable to the TV public, while behind the scenes fucking over anyone that gets in their way.  This film specializes in those close up, behind the scene moments, which are a rare glimpse at just how vulgar our leaders can be, as they likely got to where they are by being better at intimidating and browbeating others.  In the world of government, it’s all about who can threaten others successfully and get away with it, or who’s the biggest bully on the block.  Showing tenacious insight into comic material, where the key is the relentless use of ever more colorful profanity, there is a myriad of characters that collectively become a combustible force, as there’s something more powerful here than any of us realize.  That’s the part that doesn’t get written about, or examined, or subject to investigative scrutiny, and that’s the raw verbiage of high-powered political operators as they try to outscheme their opponents “by any means necessary, ” a phrase popularized by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers in the 1960’s.   Never in their wildest dreams did they think it would be the reactionary right wing law and order advocates who would secretly usurp their methodology in advancing the nation’s case for going to war.       

The Death of Stalin

THE DEATH OF STALIN                B                    

Great Britain  Canada  France  Belgium  (106 mi)  2017  d:  Armando Iannucci     

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little.      —Raymond Chandler

In contrast with Aleksei German’s Russian version of Stalin’s death, portrayed in KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! (1998), a particularly dour film Russians found uproariously funny, this is an over-exaggerated and uneven film that perhaps tries too hard to be funny, but does capture the darkly disturbing paranoia emanating from every room, however it lacks the razor-sharp wit of its predecessor, In the Loop (2009), which linked Britain’s culpability to the disastrous George Bush war efforts in Iraq, searching in vain for those weapons of mass destruction, inappropriately linking a dictator that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks to suddenly rise to become public enemy Number One (Remember that deck of cards that listed Saddam’s cast of dangerous outlaws in increasing magnitude associated with their crimes?).  Well, backtrack in time to the death of Russian despot Joseph Stalin in 1953, while increasing the magnitude of the crimes to the 20th century’s greatest mass murderer, having killed 20 million people, sending 18 million more to the gulags, while exiling another ten million.  Constructed out of the framework of a French graphic comic book novel written by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, it’s not so much a comedy as a grotesque horror show, with death lists, interrogation and murder squads, and other unimaginable crimes kept secret for decades, where the stench of blood and madness were signs of rampant murder and an all-consuming elixir of absolute uncontrolled power.  Driven by an obsession to eradicate the Jewish race in the Holocaust, Hitler’s systematic method of rounding up and transporting European Jews in trains directly to the door of extermination camps is well documented, leaving behind plenty of historical evidence, but Stalin’s crimes took place under cover of the night, where the public had no access to historical archives for decades, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed.  Shrouded in secrecy, documents destroyed, it’s hard to imagine, even today, just what took place behind closed doors, as the very act of rounding people out of their homes on such a massive scale just boggles the mind, with daily lists targeting citizens for torture, imprisonment, exile, or execution.  The thin line between the living and the condemned grew exceedingly tenuous, as this film suggests, falling into the abyss of a no man’s land following the death of the nation’s sole authority, creating a vacuum of leadership and power that needed to be filled, giving room for exaggerated absurdist caricature, as this film reimagines how it all might have played out, using an existing historical reality of the Politburo’s surviving powerbrokers that is shockingly accurate in terms of the players involved and their ruthlessly ambitious motivations.    

There’s nothing remotely Russian about the style of the film, which has more in common with Monty Python (including a leading role for Michael Palin) and the British style of humor, lampooning with sarcasm and parody, resorting to slapstick and screwball comedy, with rapid-fire, assault-style dialogue, including non-stop profanity, occurring so fast and furious that many of the best lines are lost in the onslaught, where the survivors of Stalin’s ruling elite are mostly seen as a band of bumbling nitwits, quickly turning on one another as much out of habit as anything else, as that’s how they’ve each survived living under the shadow of Stalin’s reign of terror, getting rid of anyone that could possibly pose a threat.  The enveloping tone of paranoia is established from the outset, providing a mythical moment in a country ruled by fear and murder, with citizens rounded up and shot on hearsay and rumor, where no one knew when their time had come.  Not exactly as it happened, though veiled in truth, the introduction features pianist Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko), a Conservatory musician (a classmate of Dmitri Shostakovich), whose reputation was legendary, a devout Christian Orthodox who considered her music an expression of faith, wearing a cross while performing in defiance of state-imposed atheism, also pausing during concerts to read the poetry of blacklisted Russian writers.  This caused many of her concerts to be cancelled or banned outright, where she was never allowed to travel out of the country.  While actually occurring many years earlier, the film takes liberties and stages a Radio Moscow broadcasting of a live performance of Mozart, Maria Yudina plays Mozart Concerto No. 23 in A Major (2/3) - YouTube (7:30), receiving a call from none other than Stalin himself requesting an LP of the broadcast.  As it was not recorded, the entire performance had to be repeated, causing great turmoil, including rousting another conductor out of bed, ironically taking place at the exact same time neighbors in the building are also being pulled away from their families by the police, forced to bring a new audience off the street, with the conductor working in his bath robe and pajamas.  When the police picked up the record, Yudina slipped a note inside, but Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) is initially seen telling jokes in a liquor-filled late-night meeting with several members of the Soviet Central Committee (the Politburo), including his groveling deputies, the weak-kneed sycophant Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), the First Minister and parliamentary successor, also Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the relentlessly sadistic Security Marshall and head of the KGB secret police, the portly and bespectacled man in charge of the daily lists, Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi, affectionately known as Nicky), an inept joke-riddled plotter who is a savvy comedian in his own right (his wife maintains a master list of jokes), and an elder statesman Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), the Foreign Affairs Secretary who denounced his own wife.  By the time Stalin retreats to his room, he finds the note, sort of a death wish, causing him to lose his breath, gag, and suffer a brain hemorrhage, falling comatose to the floor, where he unceremoniously lies in a puddle of his own urine throughout the night.  The guards outside his door hear the noise but refuse to enter, discovered early the next day by servants bringing him morning refreshments. 

What follows is a scurry of activity, as first Beria arrives, refusing to even look at the body, instead stealing secret files with dirt on his fellow ministers, and then the next, a display of shock and outrage and ineptitude, each one only adding to the confusion, where they’re afraid to examine the body, “If only we hadn’t put away all those highly competent doctors for treason,” eventually sending in a committee of doctors, none willing to make a pronouncement, believing it would be their own death sentence.  While Stalin does miraculously recover for a brief moment, pointing ambiguously at a painting, where like charades, they all struggle to find the meaning, before dropping dead.  The rest of the film is a surreal choreography of the feverish plotting that takes place, each with their own designs on power, though seemingly by idiots and buffoons, turning this into a farce and a charade, using humor to mask the gravity of the moment.  Part of what’s immediately funny is the contrast between authoritarianism and this “Fractured Fairy Tale,” one boldly in control, defined by certainty and death, (“The Party never makes mistakes”), and the other spinning quickly out of control (“I’ve had nightmares that made more sense than this.”), with members pointing their accusatory finger at others, twisting and contorting the truth in every which way, each refusing to take the blame themselves.  When politicians and citizens have been subdued into submission for decades, literally cowing in cowardice, it’s not like they suddenly develop a backbone.  All are viewed as morally corrupt, though the overly cynical Buscemi as Khrushchev comes across as a Brooklyn wise-ass throughout, just as if he came from the mean streets of New York (which, of course, he did), where there is no attempt whatsoever to alter the natural dialects.  Stalin speaks with a cockney accent, Beale as Beria is memorable for being the most contemptibly treacherous, a thug leading the abominable interrogations and executions, arresting and raping young female victims at will (sending them home with flowers the next day), a pedophile synonymous with evil, like a James Bond villain, though he speaks calmly like a British ambassador with perfect Shakespearean diction.  They wheel in Stalin’s children, the completely paranoid Svetlana, (Andrea Riseborough), who fears plots and demons around every corner, and the slightly demented Vassily (Rupert Friend), who is like Peter O’Toole doused in vodka, inebriated beyond comprehension, spouting off orders like proclamations, all of which are routinely ignored.  Together they put on a show of unanimity as Malenkov is paraded in front of the populace as the bold new puppet leader, but he’s afraid of his own shadow, and wears a corset, usually ending up as the butt of all jokes.  It’s not until Field Marshall Zhukov (Jason Isaacs), a heavily decorated war hero, enters the fray with orders to set things straight does power return to a recognizable place in history, as the underestimated Khrushchev outsmarts them all, promising to stop the purges and executions and actually introduce reform, rising to the top, demoting all his opponents, getting them out of the way, but the snarky final shot says it all, as lurking just behind Khrushchev in a celebratory photograph, as if eyeing him, is a young Major General Leonid Brezhnev, who unseated Khrushchev to become the second longest Soviet ruler since Stalin.  This overly fatalistic film embellishes the gloom and doom with wit and a smile while playing out Russian history like it’s a fait accompli.