A KICK UP THE KREMLIN
From the brains behind The Thick Of it, a cracking comedy about Uncle Joe Stalin...
The Death Of Stalin (15) Verdict: Mordant comedy ★★★★✩
ARMANDO IANNUCCI, whose TV shows The Thick of It and Veep were merciless in their ridiculing of political chicanery both in Britain and america, has now, inspired by a series of French graphic novels, turned his attention to the dog days of Stalinist russia.
The result is a film, partly improvised by a wonderful cast, that combines broad, knockabout comedy with razor- sharp satire — though the former, a little disappointingly, outweighs the latter. Still, it is intermittently very funny and has, by all accounts, caused much hurrumphing in moscow, where it has been labelled ‘unfriendly’ and ‘provocative’. Iannucci must be delighted. Imagine his alarm if they’d loved it.
Totalitarianism has always provided comic writers with rich pickings; how charlie chaplin must have relished the material he had to play with when he made The Great dictator. So it is here with Iannucci.
Yes, Stalin unleashed a reign of terror that was anything but funny, and the film doesn’t shy from scenes that would not look out of place in solemn thrillers. We see political dissidents — at a time when to laugh or cough at the wrong moment could be interpreted as traitorous — being rounded up, tortured and murdered, or spared and packed off to the gulags instead.
But Iannucci, as director and cowriter with david Schneider and Ian martin, has found a plentiful supply of mordant comedy in the electrifying paranoia all this generated, and, above all, in the frenzied, clumsy, ludicrous jockeying for position among Stalin’s lieutenants as soon as they realised the old man was dead and his throne there for the taking.
The movie begins in 1953 with him very much alive, however. at a moscow concert hall, a radio transmission of a mozart piano concerto is under way. The producer, andreyev ( Paddy considine), is convulsed with panic when he gets a phone call from Stalin himself (adrian McLoughlin, playing the ghastly old tyrant as a boorish cockney) demanding a recording.
HORRIFYINGLY, nobody had thought to record it. So the near- hysterical andreyev orders the orchestra to play the entire concerto again, and with some of the audience having left, gets ordinary peasant folk bundled in off the street to make up the numbers.
When the conductor knocks himself out on a fire bucket, a replacement is hurried in still wearing his dressing-gown and pyjamas.
It’s pure farce, perhaps owing something to Iannucci’s love of Fawlty Towers. and yet, like so many other farcical situations in this film, it’s all too easy to believe that it could have happened, such was the culture of dread under Stalin.
There’s a marvellous moment when Khrushchev ( Steve Buscemi) goes home to report to his wife which jokes his glorious leader liked and which fell flat. no more navy gags, the couple decide.
Soon, though, Stalin has suffered a massive stroke — and can’t get the medical attention he needs as all moscow’s best doctors have been sent into exile. The only one of his acolytes to wish him dead is Beria, the sinister chief of the secret police superbly played by Simon russell Beale. The nervy Khrushchev and Stalin’s bumbling deputy malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) are either in despair, or feigning it well. But the foolishly dutiful molotov (michael Palin) is genuinely aghast, even though Stalin and Beria have colluded to have his wife thrown into prison.
once Stalin has finally expired,
Khrushchev is saddled with the job of organising the funeral, and so resents Beria’s relentless teasing that he plots to have him terminated. How accurate all this is, I don’t know. Whatever, there are so many great performances as it unfolds that it is hard to know which to savour most.
Andrea Riseborough is perfectly cast as Stalin’s haughty daughter, Svetlana, as is Rupert Friend as her volatile, vodka-soaked brother Vasily.
Paul Whitehouse pops up too as one of the Kremlin inner circle, but if anyone comes close to stealing the show from Russell Beale it is Jason Isaacs, hilariously playing the Soviet war hero, Field-Marshal Zhukov, as a cantankerous, no-nonsense Yorkshireman. I loved the use of regional English ( and American) accents in this film; cod-Russian would have been a mistake.
On first viewing I was underwhelmed by some of the dialogue, which seemed to fish too hard for laughs using basic vulgarity as bait. Second time, I just sat back and cherished the exquisite performances.
It’s not a classic (Palin can lay claim to a greater historical mickey- take, with The Life Of Brian), and I’m not sure I’ll recommend it to my Russian sister- in- law, whose family really were packed off to the gulag, but it makes Stalin and his gang look as absurd as they were abominable, which can’t be a bad thing.