Is Iannucci grasping for a more profound truth here?
Laughs in the thick of Uncle Joe’s demise, a matriarch of folk returns, and more
The deAth oF stALin For those who’ve enjoyed Armando Iannucci’s latter-day career as the driving force behind The
Thick Of It and Veep, The
Death Of Stalin reassuringly offers more of the same. Our story focuses on the undignified scrabble for desperate short-term survival and personal elevation along the corridors of power – only this time, the price of failure isn’t a debagging from a terrifying Scottish enforcer, but actual death. “I’m exhausted!” declares one character. “I can’t remember who’s alive and who’s dead!”
As the title suggests, The Death Of Stalin follows the power struggle within the Kremlin following the Soviet leader’s death in March 1953. These include Stalin’s deputy Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) and Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), head of the feared secret service, the NKVD. The supporting cast includes Paul Whitehouse, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend and a spectacularly ripe Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, head of the Red Army.
None of the actors conceal their accents, and there’s an ancillary pleasure watching their different comedic disciplines at work – from Buscemi’s quick-fire restlessness to Palin’s veteran farceur. Russell Beale, meanwhile, plays a straighter bat, giving us a genuine villain with Beria, although none of these men are exactly heroes.
Of course, Iannucci – co-writing with old cohorts David Schneider and Ian Martin – can do this kind of thing in his sleep. “How do you run and plot at the same time?” is a line that could equally apply to any of his political comedies. But perhaps because
The Death Of Stalin is based on real events, it feels as if Iannucci is reaching for a more profound point here. The Thick Of It and
Veep were bleak appraisals of contemporary politics, but by stretching back over 50 years, Iannucci shows that ineptness and bad faith within bureaucratic systems are not a modern phenomenon. There is a scene where Beria produces Molotov’s wife, presumed dead, from incarceration in a gulag – where it transpires she’s been held as a traitor. Molotov’s response is simply to denounce her treachery again… here is a man too long in the tooth to fall for Beria’s manipulations. These are men who – to quote Veep’s Selina Meyer – are “fluent in bastard”.
the BALLAd oF shirLeY CoLLins This fine documentary about one of the great voices of British folk music opens at the bonfire-night celebrations in Lewes, East Sussex, where she lives. The footage includes a menacing procession of burning effigies and martyrs’ crosses. Elsewhere, the nearby South Downs countryside appears as a fierce, lonely and strange place, wreathed in winter mist. Collins has lived in Sussex all her life, and her work carries the rich folkloric history and song of the region. “When I was singing my best, I was the essence of English song,” she says. “I sang it better than anyone else, and understood it better than anyone else.”
Directors Rob Curry and Tim Plester follow Collins as she prepares to release Lodestar, her first album in 38 years. She is a sprightly, game interview, whose own secret history is as enticing as the lost, esoteric music she has championed. Comedian Stewart Lee – an aficionado – shows her a sheaf of old government files on the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, her former partner and a “convicted Communist”. Another longstanding admirer, Current 93’s David Tibet, presents her with three different-coloured Russian bootleg flexis of Collins singing “Polly Vaughan”. In the remote, converted horse trailer belonging to folk singer Elle Osborne, Collins drinks homebrewed elderflower vodka and muses on her new recording. “It might be a mistake, but in a way I don’t care. At least I’m going to do it.”
It’s been a life well lived, and accordingly Collins seems fazed by very little, though inevitably she still keenly feels the absence of her collaborator and sister, Dolly, who died in 1995. “It’s funny being without your sister, even now I don’t think it’s true,” she says. The final shot is Collins, having said “Toodleoo” to her latest musical collaborators, sitting back on her sofa, her eyes shining; reconnected with the earth and her music.
BorG vs mcenroe The on-court sturm und drang of Björn Borg and John McEnroe has already been the subject of one HBO documentary. Now, Danish director Janus Metz has assembled a staunch biopic about the two Wimbledon champions that owes a debt to Rush, a film that dramatised another real-life international sporting rivalry, between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. The focus is the build-up to the 1980 Wimbledon final – between “the baseline player and the net rusher” – when a television audience of 17.3 million viewers watched Borg chase his fifth straight title on Centre Court.
Newcomer Sverrir Gudnason plays the Swede as a stoic, dedicated athlete who is uncomfortable being recognised walking down the street. Shia LaBoeuf, meanwhile, is the temperamental McEnroe. The narrative leans heavily on their contrasting dispositions – scenes of McEnroe partying are cut against Borg in his hotel room, diligently measuring his pulse rate. The further McEnroe progresses through the tournament, the more enraged he becomes by the media focus on his behaviour, while Borg increasingly shuts down, wrestling to keep any anxiety in check. “Can’t you just talk about the tennis?” says an exasperated McEnroe; can’t Borg just talk at all?
Sports commentators act as a kind of Greek chorus, filling in exposition as required (“McEnroe is the bigger talent, but playing Borg is like being hit by a sledgehammer”), allowing Gudnason and LaBoeuf to get on with more actorly work. Gudnason is good as the enigmatic Björg, eventually making an introverted, awkward character likeable. LaBoeuf has been enjoyably unhinged in films lately – American Honey – and chews his way greedily through McEnroe, savouring every unpredictable tic, cuss and hissy fit.
KALeidosCoPe Toby Jones wakes up on his sofa. It’s clearly been a good night… if only he could remember it. There is a bottle and two glasses on a table, cigarette butts in the ashtray. Alas, there is the dead body of a woman in his bathroom. How on earth it got there and what role Jones’ character had to play are the subject of this very Hitchcockian drama – written and directed by Rupert Jones, Toby’s brother.
Toby Jones has a knack playing characters straying into, or being unwittingly drawn towards, mysterious spaces just outside everyday reality – like Gilroy, the sound engineer coming apart in Peter Strickland’s
Berberian Sound Studios. There is further unravelling here, but how much of what we see on screen actually happened?
The Jones brothers have crafted a clever, suspenseful film that does much to obfuscate its true intentions. A fractured timeline heightens the tension, leaving us never quite sure where we are in the sequence of events. “They found something, body parts, I heard,” confides a neighbour… but when? This broken chronology amplifies Carl’s gradual loss of control over his situation – a state of affairs only exacerbated by the arrival of his estranged mother (Corrie’s Anne Reid). When Carl meekly admits he’s had a girl in the house, she deadpans, “You’ll have some explaining to do. You told her I was dead.”
wind river Since The Hurt Locker, the career of Jeremy Renner has been defined by doughty supporting roles in bigger franchise movies. Hawkeye, a second-tier Avenger, a Cruise-lite IMF agent in the last two Mission:
Impossible films or another betrayed operative in the Bourne series. They’re all hewn from a similar, action-movie persona – good with weapons and a steely gaze – although at least in Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s classy sci-fi, he got to show his wonkier side as a bespectacled scientist.
Wind River, then, offers a rare leading role for Renner. He stars as Cory Lambert, a federal wildlife officer at the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Out on the mountain, he finds the corpse of a young woman buried in the snow. The FBI are dispatched and Lambert is partnered with Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen); these two officers have conflicting views on the crime and how best to solve it.
Wind River is written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, the author of Sicario and
Hell Or High Water, two of the best American crime dramas of the last few years. In both those films, Sheridan followed two officers working in a remote environment with its own set of rules and conventions. “Luck don’t live out here, luck lives in the city,” says one character in Wind River, though it is a common thread in Sheridan’s films. A wintry score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provides a suitable accompaniment to the lingering shots of unforgiving, snow-capped mountains.