‘Death of Stalin’ contains more humor than you might think
So a sinner dies and goes to hell, where the check-in procedure includes an introductory tour. Behind the first of three doors, the new arrival sees Hitler slow-roasting forever on a spit. The second room contains Mussolini being perpetually devoured by rats. In the third room, Stalin is making eternal love to Marilyn Monroe. “What kind of hell is that for Stalin?” the guy asks. “Oh, that’s not Stalin’s hell — that’s Marilyn’s,” the devil replies.
We don’t know the late Soviet dictator’s exact location in Hades, but we have a much clearer idea of the hell he left behind, thanks to “The Death of Stalin,” Armando Iannucci’s stunning take — equally horrific and hilarious — on the chaos following his demise.
Late one night in March 1953, shortly after hearing (and much enjoying) a radio broadcast of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, the great leader suddenly keels over from a stroke. Guards outside his door hear a thump, but they’re under strict orders never to enter without permission. Execution is the punishment, so it’s best not to chance it.
Next morning, when his body is discovered, panic spreads through the Kremlin. His senior ministers rush to the scene, virtually stumbling over each to get there first. Chief among them:
• Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), first deputy and devout Stalin loyalist who organized the Great Terror purge and treason
trials, weeps uncontrollably.
• Excitable Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) frets, wrings his hands and shouts, “This is a calamity!”
• Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the sadistic Secret Police chief, ransacks the place to find the latest “proscription” list of victims-to-be. (Stalin introduced him to Roosevelt at Yalta as “our Himmler.”)
• Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), of cocktail fame, much diminished since denouncing his own wife as a traitor to the party.
Wait a minute. Maybe he’s not yet deceased. “Call a doctor!” someone finally exclaims. But all the best doctors are either in the Gulag or dead from the recent “Doctors’ Plot” purge.
This Communist Party succession crisis is not unlike that of a 17th-century czar or seventh-century Chinese emperor — a scramble to weed out the competition, grab power and maintain order amid incessant plotting and fast-shifting allegiances.
But is it the stuff of comedy?
Director Iannucci (“In the Loop”) thinks so and provides truly comic moments of the great leader’s minions vying to get their limos at the front of his funeral procession — an event that the disgruntled Khrushchev has been put in charge of, against his will. (“Not too much off the moustache,” he tells a mortician-cosmetologist. “We don’t want Clark Gable.”)
It’s perfectly delivered by Mr. Buscemi in one of the film’s plethora of British and American accents. Mr. Iannucci instructed his superb cast not to use Russian accents, which he thought might be distracting and hinder the actors’ ability to improvise. Oddly enough, it works. It’s doubtful the real Khrushchev was as sarcastic as Mr. Buscemi makes him sound, but when Malenkov and Khrushchev call each other “Georgy and Nicky,” it sounds absurdly right. They were good friends, after all.
Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend as Stalin’s dutiful daughter and alcoholic son, Svetlana and Vasily, add delicious spice to the cinematic borscht.
Lest you thought that only action hero movies come from comic books, be disabused by the fact that so does this one — from a very historically accurate French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. Some viewers are bound to object that there’s nothing intrinsically funny about rounding up and shooting people and juxtaposing it to slapstick carrying of Stalin’s body. They’d be correct. You’re unsure whether or when to laugh during the violent proceedings, or if it’s right to laugh at all over a background of such terror and murder.
But like “The Producers” and “The Interview,” its strength lies in its blasphemy, and the thing power hates most is to be mocked: “Death of Stalin” was banned in Russia Jan. 23, two days before it was due to be released there, by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ministry of Culture: “The film desecrates our historical symbols — the Soviet hymn, orders and medals, and Marshal Zhukov is portrayed as an idiot.”
It’s cutting-edge political satire worthy of Russian dramatists Gogol or Bulgakov — farcical and frightening.
Throat-cutting edge, you might say.