’50s Soviet power struggle proves ridiculously funny
‘Veep’ creator finds odd comedic vein in ‘The Death of Stalin’
“The Death of Stalin” is a unique and hilarious British comedy from Armando Iannucci, best known as the creator of HBO’s “Veep” and the British TV series “The Thick of It.” The movie is absolutely worth seeing, but it won’t appeal to everybody, so you should know what to expect.
It’s the story of the Central Committee of the Communist par- ty in a period spanning from a few days before Josef Stalin’s death to the day of his funeral. It conflates events that took weeks and months, but otherwise it stays close to the facts in depicting the power struggle between Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless head of the secret police, and Nikita Khrushchev.
This hardly seems the subject for comedy, but in practice, that very thing presents an ideal comic opportunity, both because of the sheer perversity of these brutal figures and the bizarreness of looking at them in a comedy context. Iannucci does something remarkable here, in that he lends the whole atmosphere a quality of the ridiculous, while keeping it just within bounds of the absurd. Thus, we appreciate the stakes and take seriously that the characters are at risk and that people are getting murdered.
The movie is funny throughout, sometimes funny from moment to moment, and so full of amusing asides that you might not catch all the humor in a single screening. At the same time, “The Death of Stalin” is a weird sort of hilarious, in that you easily might not laugh for minutes at a time. Instead of one big pie in the face, doled out at intervals, the movie presents an unending series of comic jabs, offered with a blank face and no pushing.
One of the running jokes, for example, is that every time someone hears of Stalin’s death, they force themselves to burst into tears, even though it’s clear that everyone hated the guy. Watching that isn’t exactly side-splitting, but it’s definitely and consistently amusing.
Apparently, all the actors were directed to sound like themselves, and that’s a smart touch. No one tries to sound or act Russian, and no effort is made to keep the ac-
cents uniform. Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev sounds like a nervous guy from Brooklyn. As Malenkov, who assumes power after Stalin’s death, Jeffrey Tambor sounds American, while Michael Palin (as Molotov), Jason Isaacs (as Field Marshal Zhukov) and Simon Russell Beale (as Beria) are their usual British selves. Just that one linguistic choice removes everything exotic from the characters and reduces them to comedic scale.
Immediately after the death of Stalin, Beria started releasing political prisoners, both as a way to distance himself from Stalin’s atrocities and to court favor with the public. Meanwhile, Khrushchev, who saw himself as the true reformer, felt himself getting pushed to the margins, and so he fought back. It happens that way in “The Death of Stalin,” too, but in the movie, it’s funnier.
Beale plays Beria as a vile creature, full of spite and malice. He’s a standout, and so is Buscemi, who spends most of the movie either fretting or panicking, but he’s scheming, too — and Buscemi suggests that, when it counts, there’s an iron core inside this guy. Palin plays Molotov as a figure almost out of “Monty Python,” who spouts nonsense and can change opinions from one sentence to the next. And Tambor is particularly funny as the unsteady Malenkov, who is so unsure of himself that he is constantly revising his orders.
At one point Tambor as Malenkov says “No problem,” and then insists that he actually meant, “No! Problem!” What makes this particularly funny is the way that Tambor, after saying something so implausible, subtly darts his eyes around the room to see if anyone believes him.