Hilarious, Horrific Satire
Veep and The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci brings a real life power struggle to the screen with his patented flair for mocking institutions. In The Death of Stalin, as his focus is the turning point of de facto dictatorship, the mocking of bureaucratic ridiculousness is taken to a new, nasty, brilliant level. With a cast of Brits and Americans who speak in their native accents, the film feels a bit like a Monty Python take on history, run through a violent and profane version of Mel Brooks. Iannucci’s take on this moment in history, which is adapted from a graphic novel of the same name, is sublimely brutal and hilarious in equal measure, as it demonstrates the all-encompassing absurdity of authoritarianism.
The opening of the film shows a Radio Moscow broadcast of a Mozart recital, of which Comrade Stalin would like a recording. The only problem? It went out live with no record. A panicked sound engineer rushes to keep the orchestra and audience together for a second performance, and farcical complications arise. Of course, they can’t say they just didn’t record it in the first place, because Stalin might have them killed, just as he’s having groups of people rounded up for arrests and executions that same evening. The re-recital is absurd in just how innocuous a thing the recording is, and the latter is absurd in how so many people's lives can be violated or ended at the will of one man. Two sides of the same tyrannical coin.
After these events, the film almost exclusively follows the members of Stalin's Central Committee who will soon be playing tug of war with the reigns of a nation. The film doesn’t quite take the “Springtime for Hitler” approach of making all the power players look like fools. A few are lampooned like this to great effect: Michael Palin’s Vyacheslav Molotov is humorously sycophantic (no matter what that does to his personal life), and Jeffrey Tambor’s Georgy Malenkov, legally the next in line after Stalin, has no clue what he’s doing, and is too weak to compete with this story’s real powerhouses.
The focus is put on the competent players: Steve Buscemi’s Nikita Khrushchev is the seemingly good-hearted (considering his company) schemer, and Simon Russell Beale’s Lavrentiy Beria (the man in charge of the NKVD, the USSR’s Gestapo) is the savvy, slimy plotter who’s clearly been waiting for his chance to shape the country as he sees fit. He's portrayed as the man who really knew what was going on in Stalin's government, and he reminded me, in no small part because of his bald head and glasses, of Dick Cheney.
Khrushchev and Beria's rivalry, and their changing factions, provide a fun tension to follow throughout the story, even if you know who eventually comes out on top. I don’t know the full history behind this satirical spin, but the film doesn’t ignore the brutal reality of how such a push and pull for the throne can end. At a certain point, The Death of Stalin rightly stops being funny, and it’s because, just as with Veep, on a certain level it’s just sad to think of these incompetent machinations behind our governments as real. The difference here being that, instead of lying to the public or fellow politicos, these guys are killing the public and their fellow politicos.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me thank God for living in Veep’s America rather than The Death of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Mel Brooks has said that he thinks the best way to rob dictators of their power is to laugh at them. At the same time, he thinks there’s only so far you can go, and that making light of concentration camps, for example, cannot be done successfully. Iannnucci and his co-writers come right up on that line as their story takes its dark final turn, but they manage to ride that line all the way through their third act without crossing it. His style of political satire is already so cynical that it’s not a great leap to add violence, but it’s sobering when you remember that this story, or some version of it, actually happened. But, that’s why this treatment works. The Death of Stalin ends with a reminder that this whirlwind moment of dramatic upheaval was just one in a long line of Soviet power grabs, and that the futile, continuous autocratic cycle is just another sad bit of absurdity, no matter the ruler.