Armando Iannucci makes deeply political comedies that are not actually at politics at all. This is not the only good thing about his latest project, The Death of Stalin, such a remarkable thing, but it is perhaps what makes it a great film and it’s definitely what saves it from being a disaster. Given a budget beyond what he’s ever seen before, a respected source (a French graphic novel by the same name), and the freedom to do what he wants with an ambitious and inescapably controversial subject, Iannucci proves more than up to the challenge, and establishes himself as one of our best comic filmmakers not by changing his usual approach, but by layering it with fresh resources and tricks we never knew he had up his sleeve.
The Death of Stalin portrays just what the name implies: the chaotic, almost frenzied period in 1953 following the demise of the totalitarian leader of the Soviet Union following an unexpected stroke. Stalin had exercised a reign of terror for almost thirty years, but because he defended Russia from the Nazi war machine, he was more beloved than ever, and despite the brutality of his death machine — largely operated by the truly malevolent Lavrentiy Beria, played here with demonic nastiness by Simon Russell Beale — he was worshipped with cult-like devotion by millions of ordinary people. With his death, a power void was left in a country possessed of a massive army, nuclear weapons, and a fearsome reputation, and practically everyone in his inner circle scrambled to settle old scores, win the loyalty of the populace, and most of all, secure their own spot in the new order.
All of this would make for a compelling drama in the right hands. Iannucci’s aren’t the right hands for that compelling drama. His attitude towards political power has never been entirely free of ideology; there are clearly more and less admirable figures on the Central Committee, and he doesn’t shy away from that. But what has always interested him, from The Thick of It to Veep, is not party or principle, but what people are willing to do to hold on to power, and how their own personal egos, incompetencies, and grudges keep them not only from being effective leaders, but from having any perception of the harm they’re doing to their own beliefs and to the people they purport to serve. That’s the approach he takes here, and it allows him to avoid the obvious pitfalls of dealing with such a provocative subject and deliver one of the funniest, and blackest, comedies of the decade.
Viewers of Iannucci’s previous works will find much that is familiar here: the pettiness of the powerful, the elevation of the banal to the operatically absurd by its placement at the highest levels of society, corruption and selfishness taken as universal constants, and a master craftsman’s use of vulgarity. So much of the movie’s effectiveness depends on its phenomenal ensemble cast, who retain elements of the true characters of the Soviet leadership of the time but express them through their unique personalities: Beale’s Beria is a scheming Iago, so certain that his own machinations will protect him that he’s blind to how universally loathed he is; Michael Palin’s Molotov is a fussy, deliberate, wily old apparatchik whose loyalty to the party is both admirable and self-abnegating; Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev is a frustrated realist, not without his own temperament and ambition, but frustrated by the realities of internecine squabbling; Jeffrey Tambor’s Malenkov is an ineffectual, vacillating blowhard who’s egocentric enough to think he’s entitled to the wheels of power but too indecisive to know how to use them correctly; and Jason Isaacs as Zukhov is a swaggering jerk whose confidence in his martial prowess makes him a crucial ally but who holds the whole lot of them in barely disguised contempt.
But Iannucci doesn’t just let his supremely talented cast or his dazzling dialogue do all the work here. Most of his other work has seemed very much made-for-television, even In the Loop; but The Death of Stalin is absolutely a cinematic film, with broad scale, sweep, and scope. He pulls out directorial talents he’s never displayed before, and the result is a movie that looks as good as it plays. His staging is tremendous — he’s never shied away from physical humor, but he deploys it here with such skill, especially in a hilarious scene where Buscemi tries to maneuver around Tambor at Stalin’s funeral, that it’s breathtaking. The pacing of the movie is also fantastic; there have been a number of complaints about the historical accuracy of it, but leaving aside that it’s not supposed to be a historical drama or a documentary, many of these can be explained by his compressing time and events in service of the story, which he does with grace and savvy. It ticks away like a machine from beginning to end and almost never lags.
Of course, The Death of Stalin was always going to generate controversy. It’s already been banned in Russia and several former Soviet satellites, and here in the U.S., reaction from the polar extremes of opinion has been predictable. Tankies hate it because it makes Stalin look too evil, while reactionaries hate it because it makes him not look evil enough. Iannucci could have spent the whole movie mourning the demise of Stalin’s victims; there were plenty of them, and no one without huge ideological blind spots would deny that. But that would have dragged the movie down, wrenched out all of its humor, and turned it into something it’s not. Instead, it portrays the horrors of Stalin and Beria’s purges as the lunatic clanking and whistling of a state terror machine so out of control that it seems more like a gimmicky contraption in a Warner Bros. cartoon, and that’s exactly the right tone to go with the pitch-black mood he’s trying to create. It’s not that the movie is always a farce; one of the most unexpected and pleasant things about it is how well he blends drama, action, realpolitik, and genuine tension into the story. But he makes it clear that viewing the whole thing through a lens of absurdist humor is the only way to tell this story, and he’s right.
The Death of Stalin is a wickedly accomplished movie. It hums along like a jet fighter, and it’s just as deadly, with most of its stars putting in career-high performances and so many drop-dead comedic moments it generates its own body count. It’s good to look at, perfectly framed, and historically wise enough to include some of the crazy details that provoke huge laughs (Vasily Stalin’s handling of the national hockey team is one of the best bits in a movie crammed with them, and it’s 100% true), but smart enough not to let itself get so bogged down in historical fidelity that it loses all its energy and attitude. It’s the best comedy I’ve seen all year, and it’s a tragedy that people with political axes to grind will cheat themselves out of seeing it.