GETTING A LAUGH AT THE BAD OLD DAYS
The Death of Stalin warms up Cold War
British director Armando Iannucci has a knack for satire. He’s skewered politics both at home (BBC’s The Thick of It), in the former colonies (HBO’s Veep) and in both at once (see 2009’s In the Loop, Oscar-nominated for a screenplay so sharp you could shave with it).
Iannucci’s latest move is to turn back the clock and turn East, setting his story in 1953 Moscow, in the final days of the reign of Josef Stalin. On the face of it, this seems a wise move; current politics in Britain and the U.S. are doing such a fine job of parodying themselves, the real comedy comes in the daily news.
But with The Death of Stalin, Iannucci may have chosen a toorich target. Adrian McLoughlin plays the Soviet dictator, with Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend as his neurotic daughter and alcoholic son. Steve Buscemi is Nikita Khrushchev, Michael Palin plays Vyacheslav Molotov, Simon Russell Beale is Lavrenti Beria, and Jeffrey Tambor is Georgy Malenkov — all big names from the Cold War.
They’re all excellent, although Tambor is problematic given recent sexual harassment allegations made against him, and his subsequent removal from TV’s Transparent. Iannucci has said the British release of The Death of Stalin occurred before the allegations, so there was no attempt to “Plummerize” the film.
But the bigger problem for this comedy might be its raw materials of history and tragedy. Iannucci has to stick close to the truth, whereas his TV satires have allowed him to paper the corridors of power with fictional intrigues.
And while modern Western politics may be awash in bellicose metaphors, Soviet Russia was a place where backstabbing and political suicide meant literally that.
Even so, Iannucci manages to find humour in the margins of the history books, even if he has to doodle it there himself. Paddy Considine does a great job as a nervous Radio Moscow bureaucrat who discovers that the just-finished symphony broadcast Stalin wants a recording of wasn’t actually recorded. Undeterred, he has the whole thing done over again, this time to a captive audience.
And Jason Isaacs gets the having-the-most-fun-with-it award as he strides into the film’s second half as Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, his upper torso somehow more medals than chest. Although Buscemi comes a close second, showing great pragmatism as the soon-to-be Soviet leader Khrushchev. When his comrades voice concern over their choice of doctor for the ailing Stalin, he reasons: “If he recovers, we got a good doctor. If he dies, we didn’t, but he’ll never know.” The director also made a wise choice in allowing the actors to keep their natural accents, some of them (I’m looking at you, Stalin) so East London you expect them to lapse into Cockney rhyming slang. It reminds viewers that some things in this world are universal. Comedy is one, political ineptitude another.
The Soviet Union may be no more, but we can still laugh about the bad old days.