[D66] The Death of Stalin

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/09/stal-m09.html

Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin: A fatally ill-conceived “black 
comedy”
By David Walsh
9 March 2018

Directed and co-written by Armando Ianucci; co-written by David 
Schneider and Ian Martin

Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is a fatally ill-conceived “black 
comedy” about the demise of the gravedigger of the Russian Revolution, 
Joseph Stalin, in March 1953. The film is not so much maliciously 
anticommunist as it is, above all, historically clueless.
The Death of Stalin, Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev second from right

Iannucci and fellow screenwriters David Schneider and Ian Martin present 
the various surviving Stalinist officials, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy 
Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Nikolai Bulganin and the 
rest, all of whom had gallons of blood on their hands, as a largely 
ineffectual bunch of bunglers and toadies, jockeying “comically” for 
position. The betrayal of the Russian Revolution was one of the greatest 
tragedies in world history. Iannucci’s film doesn’t begin to confront 
the vast significance of the events in the Soviet Union.

His work loosely bases its antics on certain real facts. In the opening 
sequence, Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) telephones a Radio Moscow engineer 
and requests a recording of the concert that has just been played, 
forcing the engineer (Paddy Considine) to frantically round up the 
musicians and a new conductor, as well as a new audience, and perform 
the concert again.

Stalin thereupon has a stroke and goes into a coma, apparently after 
reading an angry, audacious note from a pianist whose family members 
have died in the purges. But is he actually dead? Khrushchev (Steve 
Buscemi) and the others can’t be certain for a time. What if he comes to 
life again? They go through various bits of comic business, much of it 
do with Stalin’s bodily fluids, while they determine what to do with the 
unconscious or deceased leader.

Meanwhile security chief Beria (Simon Russell Beale) continues to go 
about his murderous business and plots to take Stalin’s place. The 
latter’s official replacement, Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), is a nonentity 
and a nincompoop, who wears a corset. Out of the blue, Molotov (Michael 
Palin), the longtime Stalinist official, is presented with his wife, an 
“enemy of the people” suddenly released from prison, who he thought was 
dead. Stalin’s mad son Vassily (Rupert Friend) and dutiful daughter 
Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) show up.
The Death of Stalin

The acerbic, harassed Khrushchev organizes a coup against Beria, with 
the aid of the even more blunt Marshal Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) of the 
Soviet Army, and supervises the security chief’s execution. Indeed, if 
the film has a hero, it is Khrushchev, who promises to stop the purges 
and executions and introduce “reform.” Much of this is played as farce, 
verbal or physical.

Taken in and of themselves, there are amusing lines and moments, until 
one remembers the general context and the historical stakes, and the 
laughter freezes in one’s throat. All the actors are fine at doing what 
they are asked to do, but what they are asked to do is terribly off the 
mark.

It is impossible to make sense of a film like The Death of Stalin except 
in the context of the disastrously low level of historical knowledge or 
interest that exists in the arts at present.

Iannucci is a Scottish-born television, film and radio writer and 
director, responsible for I’m Alan Partridge (along with Steve Coogan), 
The Thick of It , In the Loop and Veep, among other efforts. Under the 
right circumstances, he is capable of creating very funny and even 
pointed satire. When it comes to bringing out the dishonesty, careerist 
opportunism and stupidity of garden-variety politicians, “media 
personalities” and other establishment figures, Iannucci probably has 
few equals today. He has a masterful way of setting in motion and 
choreographing his bumbling, sweating, inevitably lying anti-heroes.

However, when the writer-director steps outside the fairly narrow 
confines of parliamentary and entertainment industry backroom 
shenanigans, he falters badly. The second half of In the Loop, which 
satirized the British government’s complicity in the Bush 
administration’s drive to war in Iraq, is very weak, celebrating as it 
does an alliance between “progressives,” a gruff US Army general and an 
inexplicably liberal deputy secretary of state. The latter sequences, we 
noted in 2009, are “politically blunted and largely unfunny. Present-day 
geopolitics, and affairs in Washington in particular, is so surreal and 
swollen with threat that a certain type of essentially amiable humor, a 
product of and suitable for less convulsive times, simply falls short.”

HBO’s Veep too, which treats a fictional female US vice president, finds 
Iannucci over his head. As we noted in a 2016 review, the series 
“biggest shortfall is that, for all its coarseness, it is still quite 
timid in its portrayal of the ugly ‘side’ of American politics.
Andrea Riseborough and Jason Isaacs in The Death of Stalin

“The series largely focuses on the minor scandals that dominate 
day-to-day political reporting. … [T]here is precious little mention in 
Veep of war policy, drone strikes, bombings and assassinations, episodes 
that surely consume a great deal of a real president’s focus and attention.”

Art and comedy have to rise to—or at least approach—the level of the 
events or personalities they are treating. That is, there needs to be 
some artistic and intellectual correspondence between subject and 
object, if the work is going to succeed and endure.

Scathing political satire has a long history stretching back, if one 
only takes the modern era, to such works as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest 
Proposal and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in the 1720s, and Voltaire’s 
Candide several decades later.

Of course, there were many political satires in the 20th century, 
including Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-23), about World 
War I, Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), on the 
subject of Hitler’s rise, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator 
(1940). In the US, too, one could point to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 
(1961) or Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop 
Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), among other works.

Iannucci’s film is based on a French graphic novel series created by 
Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. In an interview, Robin explained his 
interest in Stalin: “A part of my family was Communist. One of my uncles 
was even a fervent Stalinist. He didn’t want to know anything about the 
reality when you explained the horrible historical events that took 
place in Russia under Stalin’s yoke.” Robin further noted that he had 
been affected by the work of Jean-Jacques Marie, the historian and 
one-time Trotskyist.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the graphic novels, which are 
not comic, Iannucci has undoubtedly added his own touch. And here it is 
simply inappropriate and, at times, grotesque.

On 03-05-18 11:43, A.O. wrote:
> (Ik verwacht een negatieve recensie bij de Northites van deze 
> slapstickfilm.)
> 
> https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-death-of-stalin-2018
> https://www.deathofstalin.co.uk/
> 
> The Death of Stalin
> 
> The writer/director Armando Iannucci has never let good taste get in the 
> way of a good and bitter laugh. The work he’s best known for here in the 
> States, the HBO comedy “Veep,” gets mad mileage out of depicting 
> American politicos as not just bird-brained and venal but as actively, 
> crassly awful. The relentless self-interest of its central character, 
> Selina Meyer, spreads like a particularly vehement poison ivy into every 
> aspect of her being. She’s funny because she’s shocking—shocking in ways 
> that you don’t want to believe another human being can be.
> 
> So there’s a sense in which portraying one of the greatest monsters of 
> the 20th century, the Soviet Union’s brutal dictator Stalin, makes sense 
> for an artist like Iannucci. First there’s the challenge. Then there’s 
> the fact that people are going to say he’s gone too far. Which, 
> peripherally, brings up another question: all the politicians depicted 
> on “Veep” have blood on their hands, while Stalin was a mass murderer of 
> a different class. Is there a metric on how many people you’ve killed 
> before it becomes a form of sacrilege to satirize you?
> 
> In a way, the question is moot, or half-moot, here, because “The Death 
> of Stalin” is about just that: the power grab of Soviet apparatchiks in 
> the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s shuffle off this mortal coil. The 
> movie, written by Iannucci with David Schneider, Ian Martin, and Peter 
> Fellows, hews pretty closely at first to the graphic novel by Fabien 
> Nury and Thierry Robin on which it is based.
> 
> The movie begins with a disaster. On Radio Moscow one evening, the 
> pianist Maria Yudina and orchestra do a heckuva job on a Mozart program. 
> So much so that Stalin phones in and asks that a recording be sent over 
> to his dacha. One problem: Radio Moscow wasn’t recording. Panic ensues; 
> only one solution is possible: restage the concert and record it. Maria, 
> who lost a relative to Dear Leader, refuses until she’s sufficiently 
> bribed. The conductor drops out in mortal fear: what if his work on the 
> re-creation isn’t up to snuff? The work eventually gets done, an acetate 
> is prepared, and Maria slips a poison pen note into the sleeve. Reading 
> it, Stalin … drops dead.
> 
> Secret police leader Beria (Simon Russell Beale), accompanied by highly 
> hapless CP Central Committee bigwig Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) take 
> charge of the situation, with Beria discovering, and pocketing, the 
> note. Other Central Committee members, including Nikita Khrushchev 
> (Steve Buscemi), soon show up, and the jockeying for advantage extends 
> to the order in which all their limousines leave from the dacha. The 
> plotting and backstabbing grows more elaborate as funeral arrangements 
> are made, and Stalin’s children have to be dealt with.
> 
> The Western politicos in prior Iannucci works—the series “The Thick of 
> It” and “Veep,” and the movie “In The Loop”—used armies and drones to 
> kill for them. The figures depicted here have no compunction about 
> taking out a pistol and putting a bullet in someone’s brain. They’ll 
> kidnap and imprison someone’s wife in a long game of power extortion. 
> And so on. Does their murderousness make them less funny?
> 
> It’s clear that Iannucci is not going for a full-on iteration of his 
> brand of comedy. Yes, “The Death of Stalin” is a kind of farce, but it’s 
> a mordant one. It never asks us to laugh at cruelty; it does make us 
> laugh at the absurd pettiness and ultimate small-mindedness of the men 
> perpetrating that cruelty. And Iannucci is a superb ringmaster.
> 
> Eschewing the banal, flat-footed conventions of verisimilitude, Iannucci 
> has each of the cast members speak as he or she normally does from Simon 
> Russell Beale’s high-end London tones to Steve Buscemi’s Brooklynese. 
> The effect is of the creation of a standalone reality, and I think it 
> works. For comparison, lend an ear to the array of clumsy 
> Boris-and-Natasha “Russian” accents thrown around in “Red Sparrow” and 
> get back to me. In any event, it allows the virtuoso cast to have at 
> each other in a brisk and seemingly spontaneous a way as possible. You 
> get a feel for the characters that transcends accents.
> 
> Most provocatively, Iannucci assays a moderately sympathetic portrait of 
> Khrushchev, despite the awful murderous action he takes in his quest to 
> seize power. Expanding the characterization in the graphic novel, he 
> brings Khrushchev’s sincere desire for reform to the forefront. The 
> point Iannucci makes by so doing is an uncomfortable one. But this is a 
> movie that wants you uncomfortable, in a variety of ways. Even when 
> you’re laughing, and you will be.
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66