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. Continue reading “The Death of Stalin”