“I’m smiling, but I’m very fucking furious.”
If I had to choose one quote from The Death of Stalin, now available on DVD and VOD, to encapsulate the tone and the larger style of comedy brought to the film by co-writer and director Armando Iannucci from his previous work on The Thick of It (and its feature spin-off, In the Loop) and Veep, it would be this little one-liner snarled by Jason Isaacs about midway through the film, shortly after he swaggers on screen as General Georghy Zhukov.
Iannucci tracks in smiling monsters, men and women who look and may even act like acceptable human beings, but really those masks barely conceal the stewing cauldron of greed, rage, and insecurity that drives them to myriad destructive acts. A true poet of profanity, Iannucci’s comfort zone remains writing pages and pages of hilariously complex and convoluted insults and tirades, littering each exchange with enough “fucks” and “cunts” to choke a horse, and then letting his ensembles fire these words at each other with machine gun efficiency.
With The Death of Stalin, Iannucci returns to the big screen in fine form, along with a newly-polished visual aesthetic that sharply defines Stalin as its own animal, apart from the docu-drama look of Iannucci’s previous work. The result is both wildly entertaining and bracingly furious, equipped with white-hot rage and a jet-black worldview.
The year is 1963, and the Soviet Union is frozen in a near-constant state of terror. Many are destitute and hopeless, and each night the secret police, the NKVD, raid homes and drag supposed subversives away, never to be seen again [this movie is a comedy]. Iannucci illustrates this state of disrepair via an opening vignette in which a desperate radio operator (Paddy Considine) frantically attempts to re-stage a concert in order to provide an impatient Stalin with a recording. Stalin (played, briefly, by Adrian McLoughlin) is painted in brief, broad strokes as a childish, temperamental dolt, indulged in every stupid whim by a populace and an inner circle either too terrified or too worshipful to ever disagree with him.
But all that changes when Stalin keels over one night (and is left to lie in his own piss for hours because his guards were instructed not to disturb him and, again, they’re too terrified to investigate). The Central Committee quickly forms, including bureaucrat Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), intelligence (read: torturer and spymaster) head Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Stalin’s deputy Georgy Malenkov (that asshole Jeffrey Tambor), and affable, brainwashed Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin). In the wake of Stalin’s passing, the Committee members trip over themselves to both stage a funeral for their dearly departed dictator and fill the power vacuum he left.
Iannucci quickly returns to perhaps his favorite topic of satire: Just because certain people run the world, that doesn’t make them actually smart. The Committee quickly falls to backbiting and double-dealing, slipping on an endless array of banana peels in their madcap attempts both to adequately perform grief while also engaging in a battle for power. Dueling plots quickly begin to amass, plots that eventually expand to include Isaacs’ Zhukov and his army, and Stalin’s level-headed daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) and drunken moron of a son, Vasily (Rupert Friend).
As is often the case with Iannucci, it’s the person most ruthlessly focused on their own preservation who emerges victorious, but with a backdrop of genocide, gulags, and mass-executions, the filmmaker’s familiar political games now possess a bloody pulse that was not always apparent in his earlier work.
The Death of Stalin lacks the kind of central force-of-nature performance that made In the Loop and Veep so formidable. Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker wields “cunt” like a baseball bat, smashing down anyone who stands against him, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus matches him invective for invective as Selina Myers on Veep. Buscemi’s Khrushchev is our central figure for much of The Death of Stalin, and he is both a good deal more reasonable and even-tempered, and a good deal less fun, than those other two.
The supporting cast largely makes up for it, particularly a delightfully Cockney-lilted Issacs as one of the few actually capable people on hand. Friend (from Homeland, and I guess he was also Agent 47 in that last Hitman movie) is a similar revelation as the buffoonish blowhard Vasily. Iannucci draws on a truly insane real life anecdote for much of Vasily’s material, and it’s some of the bleakest, funniest stuff in the entire film. That asshole Jeffrey Tambor plays nascent dictator Malenkov as one step removed from his Larry Sanders character, constantly pingpong-ing between towering ego and naked insecurity. And God is it great to have Michael Palin (the best Python, don’t @ me) back. Molotov is the member of the Central Committee that has probably lost the most during Stalin’s regime, and his method for coping was by subjugating himself almost entirely to Stalin’s will. The ways this manifests and mutates after Stalin’s death is, again, horrifying on paper but also hysterically funny as realized by Iannucci and Palin.
If Buscemi is our de facto lead, that makes Beria our villain, and Beale positively drips menace as the spymaster. I’m not familiar with Beale outside this film (except for his supporting turn as a flamboyant spiritualist on Penny Dreadful, in which he is unrecognizable) but he’s mesmerizing here. Beria may be the most craven and most destructive of the Committee, but his evils are largely the same as the other members. Beria is simply the one willing to flaunt the savagery that his position allows him to indulge, and it makes for a truly hiss-worthy big bad (Sidenote: If Matt Reeves is hankering for a new Penguin in his Batman movie, the search ends here).
But the truth is, they’re all bad. Iannucci’s style doesn’t really allow for moral forces, not because morality doesn’t exist but because good people wouldn’t be caught within a hundred feet of boot-steppers and gladhanders this repulsive. The scope of the Soviet Union of this time’s barbarism is so great that Iannucci’s camera never pauses as bodies roll down stairs, gunshots ring, and executions carry out in the background. Iannucci contrasts the poverty and desperation of the streets with Stalin’s comfortable estate and the sprawling interiors of the government buildings where his funeral is held, really making you question why anyone would want to rule over a nation this abjectly dejected.
They want it because power for power’s own sake has long been the siren call for Iannucci’s cold-blooded protagonists. He’s revisited this theme again and again, but this story and this setting allow him to write in fire and blood, and it may come as a shock to some to see just how blunt this material gets. As the film reaches its end game, the laughs drop away and the witty banter goes quiet. Iannucci seems to regard these cycles as self-perpetuating, as the cruelty required to overthrow cruelty only results in the new victors falling into the same patterns and same traps that required the overthrowing in the first place.
Let us all hope to live long enough to see him proven wrong, for once.
