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.       

Dying Laughing

DYING LAUGHING                        B-                   

Great Britain  (89 mi)  2016  d:  Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood

Comedy is purely a result of your ability to withstand self-torture.  That’s where you get great comedy.  Your ability to suffer and go, ‘That damn thing still doesn’t work.  I’m gonna write it again; I’m gonna try it again.’ And If you’re willing to do that, 85 times for a stupid joke, over the course of many years, great jokes get written.

—Jerry Seinfeld 

A British documentary on the art of stand-up comedy, viewed through the lens of current British and American comedians speaking about their craft, interviewing more than 50 comedians overall, though the film refuses to show actual clips of them performing their routines.  While it only superficially examines the surface, the basic premise explores a comedian’s first moments onstage, how it’s not at all what one expects, as it’s rarely a laugh riot, instead it’s a brutally harsh environment where judgmental behavior can instantly go awry, leaving you exiting the stage in a cold sweat, swearing you’ll never try that again, as it’s such a personal rebuke of who you are as a human being.  Unlike other industries or mediums, there is no filter in this profession, where it’s about as personal as it gets, with nothing to protect you from drunken hecklers or a vehemently disinterested audience that simply refuses to laugh at your material and instead calls for you to get off the stage.  The personal nature of the rejection, cries of “you stink” coming from the audience, pierce through a comedian’s armor with often devastating results.  These are painful moments in the life of every starting comedian, yet that wall of negativity is what must be overcome if you wish to remain in the profession.  According to Jerry Seinfeld, “The first time you go on stage, you don’t realize how harsh of an environment it actually is.  When you watch comedians, when you don’t know anything about the context, it seems like the audience is kind of having a good time anyway. That’s not what’s happening at all.  What’s happening is nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  It’s dead, solid quiet from a room of unhappy people…and you have to start from that.”  You must experience the silent indifference and epic emptiness of the low moments before you can rise to greater heights, rewriting and reworking your material, being better prepared next time, intentionally targeting that wall of silence.  Shot in black and white, with cameras pointed at a series of comedians who each answer one at a time, recalling their worst experience onstage.  While most have the ability to keep it light and funny, others are visibly hurt by the extent of the personalized pain, suggesting that is something that never goes away.  While there is a long list of mostly recognizable figures including Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx, Cedrick the Entertainer, Steve Coogan, and even Jerry Lewis, among others, including some unfamiliar British faces, the personalized nature of their experiences makes this uniquely interesting and hilariously funny at times, but the material grows thin after a while and loses its cutting edge, continually repeating itself, where you get the feeling it’s drifting, never really going anywhere.

While several of the remarks are profoundly moving, offering a sense of tragedy, the filmmakers never follow up to explore more deeply, content at providing a generalized overall view, while the film may actually be a self-help guide or an instructional kit for what to expect when you embark on your new career as a comedian.  We do get a sense that many comics start by copying others, doing imitations, stealing each other’s jokes, but that the best laughs come by telling true stories, something that is authentically your own, as this is something that’s never been heard before.  Chris Rock claims “Only poetry comes up to the same level.  We’re the last philosophers,” claiming they are the last remaining group that is totally allowed unconditionally to speak freely.  “Everybody now that talks is reading from a preapproved script.  Even our alleged ‘smart people’ are corporately controlled.  So there’s only one group of people that kinda say what they want to say.”  Without delving into the art of comedy or what makes something funny, the film is actually more interested in the painful moments, where each is asked to relive the most brutally painful experience they’ve ever had onstage, including when they’ve bombed, where there’s a large segment devoted to hecklers, where some face them head on, refusing to allow others to wrest the power from their microphones, while others recall racially tinged hecklers that simply stopped the show altogether, forcing them off the stage, never to return to that location ever again.  There seems to be a difference in American and British comedians, as Americans have a tradition of going “on the road,” indicating a willingness to accept a certain amount of rural desolation, far from anyplace recognizable, where they’re booked into an endless series of nights in small towns along barren highways with bad food and no name motels, where the isolation is crushing, far from your family and everything you’re familiar with, completely alone, not knowing anyone in town, yet you’re supposed to be funny in a room full of strangers, with some reporting the audience is the first conversation they’ve had with anybody else all day.  British comedians usually play in large metropolitan towns, where there’s no sense of the utter isolation that Americans are forced to experience.  Sometimes you perform in bars, where they turn off the TV when you begin your act, but some patrons are personally invested in whatever sporting event was being shown, screaming for the TV to be turned back on, getting pissed off and angry, but then the comedian is supposed to fill the room with laughs. 

The film never revisits history, but traditionally, in the old vaudeville halls, comedians were used to entertain the crowd before the dancing girls came onstage, where they were routinely booed off the stage or stopped in mid act to bring on what the audience came to see.  Similarly, Keenan Ivory Wayans remembers playing a set in the remote wilds of Alaska, where the venue was a strip club, with an audience full of men packing guns who’d been working out in the wilderness for the last six months, who had no interest in his jokes, as they hadn’t seen a naked woman in several months. Unfortunately, there is too much unnecessary filler material, comments from people we don’t know or like, who are basically echoing sentiments we’ve already heard earlier in the film by somebody else.  While the British comedians probably play well in England, and the Americans in the United States, only a few are popular on both continents, which means audiences from both nations will be expected to hear unfamiliar voices that may affect one’s appreciation for the film.  Ultimately what stands out is that the career of comedians is hardly glamorous, and more often grueling and disorientating, especially being in unfamiliar places, where black female comedian Cocoa Brown reveals, “It’s lonely.  You know, I can be onstage in front of 5,000 people, get a standing ovation and go to my hotel room to complete silence.  And I’m looking at the money on the bed, and the room service I just ordered, but I have no one to call.”  According to Amy Schumer, she felt lucky if there was free yogurt and orange juice offered in the lobby in the morning, while Royale Watkins is reduced to tears recalling his worst show happened with Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson in the audience, making it even more excruciatingly painful, as in those moments you don’t get a second chance, so despite hundreds of successful shows, this is the one that sticks with you.  While searching for that magic to click onstage, something Jerry Lewis describes as “the hallelujah moment,” the film seems to fixate on the dark underbelly of the profession, recalling heartbreaking moments onstage, where depression also follows you in the utter isolation of being on the road, forced to confront hostile and indifferent crowds, where all it takes is one inebriated heckler to ruin it for everybody else.  Following the recent suicide of Robin Williams (two years ago), it reminds us of the unseen psychological toll that follows these comedians throughout their careers, even after considerable success, where a part of their emotional world always feels damaged, leading to increased anxiety, insecurity, and in some cases substance abuse.  Dedicated to Gary Shandling, who also died less than a year ago, the film is a testament to what it takes to survive.