IT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM SHELF!

After creating and show-running the HBO series Veep for four seasons, Armando Iannucci was looking for a new subject on which to point his satiric pen.  He had already skewered the British government with his long-running BBC series The Thick of It and had expanded his political mockery to Washington D.C. with his feature film In the Loop (2009) and the aforementioned Veep.  Looking around the globe, Iannucci felt that democracy was beginning to sit upon unsteady ground (and this was before the more recent developments of the Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election), so the climate seemed right for a satire about a fictional dictatorship.  It was around the same time that the French graphic novel The Death of Stalin by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin fell into Iannucci’s hands, and he found that the true events that occurred in Moscow in 1953 had all the farcical elements that he was looking for in a dictatorship comedy.  For the film version of The Death of Stalin, Iannucci and his co-writers compressed the timeline of events surrounding Joseph Stalin’s death from three months to a few days and gave the members of the dictator’s inner circle more witty, expletive-filled dialogue than their historic counterparts would have used, but the fundamentals of the history stayed more or less the same.

Under the constant threat of the death lists assembled by the Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), and his Chief of Security, Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics live in a constant state of paralyzing fear.  When Stalin suffers a fatal stroke, Beria and the other Ministers of the Presidium start maneuvering to take the old man’s place.  Being the most devious of the bunch, Beria takes the early lead in the race for power, manipulating Stalin’s planned succesor, the vain and weak Chairman of the Central Committee, Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), while saddling the more crafty Minister of Agriculture, Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), with the thankless job of planning Stalin’s funeral.  As for the rest of the Presidium, Deputy Prime Minister Lazar Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley), Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), Minister of Trade Anastas Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse), and Minister of Defense Nicolai Bulganin (Paul Chahidi), Beria counts on using long-held secrets and his private security force to keep them in check.  However, some of the Ministers prove to be more canny than Beria anticipates, and there are too many wild cards to keep track of, once Stalin’s children (Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend) and the Head of the Red Army, Field Marshal Zhukov (Jason Jason Isaacs), are added to the mix.  This life or death struggle is anybody’s game.

Armando Iannucci is no stranger to political satire, but wringing humor from Stalin’s reign of terror comes with a higher degree of difficulty than anything that he and his co-writers have previously attempted.  Their prior work has made fun of the vanity, hypocrisy, back-stabbing, and deceit at the highest levels of power, but that work has always centered around fictional characters and fictional situations (admittedly, In the Loop did come awfully close to some of the real circumstances behind the run up to the Iraq War).  Here, Iannucci and his team are dealing with real events and real atrocities.  Real people were imprisoned, tortured, raped, and killed.  Making fun of the machinations and abuses of the men in Stalin’s inner circle, while taking seriously the damage they inflicted, is the comedic equivalent of walking a tightrope while simultaneously threading a needle.  Happily, the resulting film is a triumph.  While the profanity-dense dialogue and performances are hilarious throughout, the script never lets the characters off the hook.  Every time you begin to root for or laugh with one of the members of the Presidium, the writers throw in a reminder of their horrific deeds (often by having the characters hear their crimes read aloud to them).  While Beria is the true villain of the piece, you are never allowed to forget that all of the players are odious men, fully complicit in the crimes of Stalin, Beria, and each other.

Due to the dark subject matter, some may not find the film as uproariously funny as some of the best episodes of The Thick of It or Veep; and in fact, the laugh quotient may not be quite as high.  Still, I think the film is Iannucci’s smartest comedy and best work.  The film not only succeeds as an extremely witty entertainment; the atmosphere of fear, paranoia, and impending death within a totalitarian regime is conveyed as well as one would find in any serious historical drama.  The picture is a bit more cinematic than the director’s previous work, but the direction and editing is still always in aid of the joke.   Iannucci understands instinctively that comedy works best in medium shots and long shots, rather than in close-ups, in order to take in the full physicality of the comedic performances on display.

Iannucci has assembled an amazing group of actors, and the unusual casting choices, such as having twitchy Steve Buscemi portray Khrushchev, work tremendously well.  The insipid Georgy Malenkov is a tailor-made role for Jeffrey Tambor; Michael Palin proves that nobody is better at delivering droll double-speak; and Jason Isaacs makes a grand entrance in the final third of the film to inject the proceedings with a fresh comic energy and ridiculous levels of testosterone. However, the film really belongs to Simon Russell Beale as the venomous Beria.  The actor, best known for his Shakespearian stage work, is a delicious ball of menace, and he more than holds his own in witty byplay with the seasoned comedians in the cast.

Hopefully, Armando Iannucci has many more film and television projects still ahead of him, so it is too early to call The Death of Stalin his masterpiece; but it certainly is “a masterpiece.”  The film won’t appeal to everyone.  Some will find it difficult to stomach the bleak subject matter; and despite Iannucci’s best efforts to avoid making light of the human cost of this history, the easily offended will find something in the film with which to take issue.  However, I think that there is a good chance that Iannucci’s film will endure and will eventually be discussed in the same breath as Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).  It’s just that good.  The Death of Stalin serves as both a hilarious comedy and a sobering reminder of the damage that can be wrought when too much power is put into the hands of too few.

UK/C-107m./Dir: Armando Iannucci/Wr: Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin, and Peter Fellows/Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin, Jason Isaacs, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend, Dermot Crowley, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi, Olga Kurylenko, Paddy Considine, Adrian McLoughlin

For Fans of: If you enjoy Veep, if you’re a history nerd, or if you simply aren’t afraid of dark comedy, you may find that The Death of Stalin was made for you.

Video: The film is still slowly opening across the U.S., and I’d highly recommend seeing it in a theater if you can.   However, the film opened in the U.K. back in October of 2017, and has already been released on video across the pond.  If you have a Blu-ray player that is capable of playing Region-B discs, you can already obtain a British The Death of Stalin [Blu-ray].  I have been unable to find a full list of special features included on the Blu-ray, but reportedly, the release includes audio commentary from the writers, as well as interviews with the cast and crew.

Streaming: At the time of this review, The Death of Stalin is still in theaters, so if you are streaming it, you are doing something illegal.  Shame on you, comrade.

More to Explore: Fans of HBO’s Veep may not be familiar with Armando Iannucci’s inventively profane British forerunner The Thick of It, which starred Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the expletive-spewing Director of Communications for the British Prime Minister.  Capaldi’s television character was so popular, that Iannucci included Malcolm Tucker in his feature film In the Loop, whick skewered both the British government and the White House.

Trivia: Armando Iannucci decided not to have the actors speak in Russian accents for two reasons.  First, he thought that audiences would be distracted from the story he was trying to tell by seeing recognizable British and American actors attempting a Russian accent.  Secondly, during the rehearsal period, he wanted his actors to feel free to improvise and potentially improve upon the written dialogue without worrying about their accent.  Consequently, everyone speaks in their regular voices, with the exception of Jason Issacs, who felt that a Yorkshire accent would sound more blunt and threatening than his natural tone.

For More Info: For more information on the events upon which the film is based, you may want to read the original graphic novel The Death of Stalin written by Fabien Nury and illustrated by Thierry Robin.  Beria is the central character of the book, with Khrushchev and the other members of the Presidium relegated further in the background.