If Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is about Trump’s America in any way, it’s that sheer incompetence looks really funny right up until the point that things get scary quickly. No one is doing better fictional political satire on TV or film than Iannucci. And while Veep nor The Death of Stalin are direct portraits of today’s political climate, they find clever and often profane parallels in unexpected characters and situations.
The Death of Stalin actually imagines the bureaucracy of a dictatorship, making organized murder the stuff of bumbling fools and power-mad idiots. Set in the waning days of Stalin’s life, it imagines how Stalin’s cadre of Soviet leaders, including Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) scramble to determine just what to do with Stalin at death’s door, all as they conspire to rise to the top and avoid their own heads on the chopping block.
Iannucci feeds into this constant push and pull dilemma between their love and loyalty for Stalin and their hope to be rid of him. When Stalin passes out in his office, the two guards hear him collapse, but they’re too petrified to do anything about it. One misstep and they’ll be shot. And when everyone finally discovers him, they kneel down beside him in agony, only to hilariously cringe and stand up when they realize they’re kneeling in a puddle of Stalin’s piss. It’s a ruthlessly efficient government where everyone knows the consequences of anything they might do, so paradoxically, nothing ever gets done at all. And everyone still ends up dead.
The film alternates lightly between those with Russian, American and English accents. And it’s equal parts slapstick and fiendish wordplay. There’s a scene where Stalin’s lifeless body rolls on top of another man as his associates try hopelessly to get Stalin into his deathbed. And this visual gag says as much about the Soviet, institutionalized incompetence as a scene in a council meeting without any actual democracy. Tambor’s character leads the room in a vote and says “Carried U…nanimously,” waiting a beat as everyone begrudgingly raises their hands in agreement.
But what sets The Death of Stalin apart from its foul-mouthed sister film In the Loop is that Iannucci takes a grimly serious turn just as the film is reaching its comedic climax. Buscemi initially plays Khrushchev as shifty and awkward as we’ve seen from him in so many of his comedic parts, only to go full mobster as he wields his own iron fist.
The Death of Stalin stops being funny on a dime, and it’s a powerful reminder of how corruption and incompetence breeds totalitarianism. In that sense, American audiences shouldn’t just take this film as a history lesson, but a warning.
3 ½ stars
so happens i actually remember these guys–malenkov, molotov, bulganin, and of course khrushchev–from those early post-stalin 50s, so part of my reaction to this involves matching these imagined after-the-fact characters with my own (admittedly narrow) recollections of them * in some cases, the characters seem to grow into their recollected (by me) selves as the movie goes along: “hmmm yes, i can see that, as a POSSIBLE reading”–e.g., tambor’s malenkov: all wrong, by first estimate, and yet, especially with the dour rally posters, he becomes someone who strikes a chord, a familiarity i didn’t think was, or ever could be, there * and buscemi’s khrushchev: could he ever have been that thin? and was he ever quite so feckless * but buscemi wears his pants high, which at leasts makes him look dumpy, if not exactly fat, and the fecklessness ultimately evolves into something else … albeit i have traces of it even in my remembered nikita: the UN shoe debacle, the kitchen debate with nixon, etc * plus, this was the physiognomic k BEFORE the peak nomenklatura diet would’ve kicked in–who knows what that could do to a person? * but michael palin’s molotov is spot-on: always “v.m.,” by the way–or “v.m. ‘iron pants,'” at least in western media parlance: this “vyacheslav” stuff is for those who don’t remember, which presumably includes most current reviewing personnel (not to mention the film’s own press kit!) * another: the bulganin i remember was invariably dour, dense, and humorless: so much more appealing the movie’s ditzy reconstruction … plus who can say what we did or didn’t know back then? * though perhaps most of all there’s the divinely idiotic “marshal zhukov” (jason isaacs), that heroic “man of the people” and stereotypical russian BRUTE … almost a trump before the fact, except his cojones were undoubtedly real * and i simply LOVE the theatrical scar on his cheek–as don’t we all!
which isn’t to dismiss the REAL heavyweight in the bunch, at least by the movie’s own reckoning * who knew beria could have been so miltonic, almost like PARADISE LOST’s satan, a person who’s seen ends and beginnings, the farther shores of human possibility, also of human wretchedness, a paradox of understanding hardly to be borne–least of all by the individual himself, or, for that matter, by ANY conceivable human personality? * “i’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work–will never EVER work!”: really, really remarkable–i suppose we can only shudder …