TV comic luminary reduces Stalin's Politburo successors to a coterie of foul-mouthed, bumbling misfits

Rating: 4/10 (27 May 2018)

A mainstream comedy writer, known for Veep on television, Armando Iannucci as director and co-writer, has ventured into the realm of a much darker subject, "The Death of Stalin." The genre is black comedy, a send-up, where the principal members of the Politburo vie for power following the death of Stalin of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953.

Most of the humor is sophomoric but occasionally there are a few moments of mirth. The dark atmosphere of Stalinism is ably conveyed in the film's introductory scene based on real events. A Radio Moscow producer forces an orchestra to replay a concerto so that a recording can be pressed for Stalin who demands it on a whim.

A conductor is dragged out of bed, the audience is not permitted to leave and additional people from the streets are conscripted to fill out the hall (ironically most of these newly minted spectators are members of the proletariat, who have little to no interest in classical music). Historically the actual event occurred nine years prior to the terrifying dictator's death, but no matter-the bizarre nature of the various Russians' acquiescence, reveals the level of fear that gripped the populace during those unhappy times.

Iannucci unfortunately attempts to extract humor not from an examination of a crazed bureaucracy designed to cope with terrifying circumstances-but by focusing on and then reducing Stalin's successors as a coterie of buffoons. Oddly no character sports a Russian accent but rather utilizes an unsuccessful mix of American and British doggerel. Steve Buscemi is particularly unconvincing as Khrushchev-not only doesn't he look like Stalin's eventual replacement but delivering his lines in colloquial American English, hardly sounds like the man who told an American audience at the United Nations that "we will bury you."

The plot loosely follows how the various players attempt to grab their share of power following the leadership vacuum left wide open after Stalin's death. As in real life, the principal villain is NKVD state security head Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) who attempts to buy Foreign Minister's Molotov's (Michael Palin) loyalty by arranging for the release of his wife, denounced as a traitor and imprisoned a few years earlier by Stalin.

Meanwhile Deputy General Secretary Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) is nominally put in charge of the government only to prove that he is spineless, vacillating between the various factions and failing to make any decisive decisions. Eventually it's Khrushchev who conscripts World War II Army hero Marshall Zhukov, who arrests Beria and basically arranges his execution (with the approval of the rest of the Politburo).

Iannucci's one-note characterization of the principals as a group of foul-mouthed misfits does not jibe with the reality of their personalities. Worse is the implication that Stalinism was principally the fault of men like Beria, an overt sadist and child molester who takes on the convenient role of the fall guy here.

Samuel Goff in his article in the Calvert Journal "The Death of Stalin: a black comic masterpiece? Don't make me laugh," argues that Iannucci fails to discuss the "mechanisms of power" in Stalinist Russia. It's the "faceless pencil-pushers" who "combine to enact mass death, the memo a more potent symbol of the system than the rifle, the whole thing a meeting of bland procedural discipline and actual murder. There is not enough banality in Iannucci's portrait of evil." Goff rightly concludes that "we see horror, and we see satire, but never in conjunction. The result is a lacklustre and tonally confused story about some awful men being awful to each other."

Whatever you believe about the men who led the Soviet Union following the tyrant Stalin's death, they were not a bunch of bumbling fools. If slapstick and a series of pratfalls are your "thing," then you might actually find The Death of Stalin to be humorous. More demanding critics must require a more serious examination of a ghastly historical reality.