Veep creator takes on Stalin with satire
Armando Iannucci film depends on the balance of the grim and comedic is Armando Iannucci’s latest work skewering the antics of politicians.
It is a curious thing, this world, spinning in chaos, its politics no longer bound by gravity. It troubles and amuses Armando Iannucci, a sly satirist with a soft voice, who glances into a coffee cup and, with little warning, ditches his Scottish accent and imitates the leader of the free world.
“Hey, I tell ya, this is the best coffee I’ve ever had. I mean the Seoul coffee was good. But the coffee we had in our hotels, I’ll tell you, there was one day a guy came in, he was from China. China, by the way, is where . . .” Iannucci said, as if hitched to one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s circuitous thoughts.
“His speech is like five apps opening simultaneously,” Iannucci added of Trump. “He’s engulfed in his own speech bubble. I don’t think you could come up with a fictionalized version of Trump. He’s his own satire.”
Iannucci has been skewering the antics and insecurities of politicians for years. He’s the creator of HBO’s Veep and its British forbearer, The Thick of
It, and his characters speak in skeins of expletives and scathing syllables that reduce rivals to sputtering, withered messes.
Like Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in Veep, they are funny, bumbling and cruel, hardened in a chicanery that masquerades as public good while stumbling over vulnerabilities that singe the spirit. Iannucci’s new film, The
Death of Stalin, opening this Friday in Toronto, is a dark comedy about Joseph Stalin, the tyrant of the Soviet Union who killed millions of his countrymen from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.
Stalin was a man of gulags and firing squads, a poster villain for the dangers posed by despots. He was at once coarse and calculating — an ideal subject for Iannucci’s narrative mischief and biting wit.
“I was looking three years ago to set a fictional dictatorship in the present day, because I thought ‘something funny is going on,’ ” said Iannucci, who based Stalin on a French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. “Populist movements. Nationalist movements. Authority figures in Turkey, Russia; Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Something’s not quite right. Democracy’s beginning to look a little precarious. It was funny in a grim sort of Kafkaesque way.”
Starring Steve Buscemi, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor and Jason Isaacs, Stalin is wackyensemble political theatre with a foreboding edge. Sycophants and connivers — from Nikita Khrushchev to Vyacheslav Molotov — navigate the psychology and bureaucracy of a Communist state, where people went to bed fully dressed in the event that the secret police plucked them from their homes in the pitch of night. The film infuses menace with humorous set pieces, including Stalin dying in his own urine while apparatchiks argue over whether they should convene a quorum and vote to call a doctor.
“I went back and looked at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (a 1940 parody of Hitler), and you’ve got some of the funniest ever Chaplin scenes interspersed with scenes from the Jewish ghetto,” Iannucci said. “It’s tricky — and I knew it would be. It would rise or fall on that balance. If we didn’t get it right, it would either be too grim to be funny or not believable because it’s too silly.”
Russia has banned The Death of Stalin as an affront to its history. The film has already opened in Europe and critics there have generally praised it. Some, however, thought it not as incisive as Iannucci’s 2009 cinematic directorial debut, In the Loop, a statecraft riff on plans by the U.S. and Britain to invade a Middle Eastern country.
In its review of Stalin, the Guardian wrote: “The tone ends up being oddly serious, the comedy bleak rather than black, and the final product is somehow both more sombre and less caustic than Iannucci’s sharpest, silliest work.”
Iannucci, 54, is a slight man with an anarchist’s wiles; when he speaks, his hands appear to be fidgeting with an invisible Rubik’s Cube. Unlike his foul- mouthed characters, he is polite and inquisitive, perhaps the result of his years at Oxford, where he studied the poet John Milton, or his boyhood days amid ever-questioning Jesuits in a Scottish grammar school. He brims with metaphor, and one senses he is often shortlisted for dinner parties.
He lives in England with his wife and children. Iannucci often travels to the United States and is conversant in politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
“He’ll never accept anything at face value,” Timothy Simons, who plays smug and despicable congressman Jonah Ryan on Veep, said of Iannucci. “He’ll keep digging and digging until he finds five or six layers of information, which then turn into five or six layers of jokes.” Much of Iannucci’s work glides the edge of going too far before finding restraint that keeps it at once outrageous and quite real. One of his favourite works of political literature is Robert Caro’s multi-part biography of former president Lyndon B. Johnson, which inspired Veep. The Johnson story, Iannucci said, epitomizes the tragicomic: a powerful man and a prodigious senator who suddenly finds himself playing second fiddle as vice-president to John F. Kennedy.
For all their pettiness, egos and dark motivations, Iannucci said he understands the promise and temptations of politicians like Johnson.
“Some are very good, some are not so good,” he said. “All of them are fallible; a lot have principles, others not so much. I sympathize with them. I want politics to work. What frustrates me is seeing politicians who you know are gifted and talented but are reining in their talents and ideas for the sake of the short term.”