Political Stupidity

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2019)

Stalin's death hasn't been this amusing since "Children of the Revolution" (1996), which isn't something I though I'd ever write. Armando Iannuci and company transplant their brand of political farce from liberal Western democracies lampooned previously, with "In the Loop" (2009) and the HBO series "Veep," to the transition of authoritarian power in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. As others have criticized, "The Death of Stalin" is riddled with historical inaccuracies, but Iannuci's prior, aforementioned work isn't amusing for fidelity or even cutting satire, either. It's always a bunch of cruel numbskulls yelling at and backstabbing each other. But, now, it's in the USSR, so people are slaughtered, too. The result is an uneven black comedy.
Gallows humor works well enough, I suppose, when members of the politburo are executed, but it's another thing entirely when the masses are being shot and trampled to death. The movie is given too much credit by some for being supposedly insightful; it's not. Obviously, the USSR and Stalinism was a disaster, and making the men in charge into caricatures doesn't really lend any enlightenment upon that. Don't get me wrong, though; politics is worthy of mockery. After a slow start (the opera stuff seems particularly irrelevant and unfunny) and despite a lot of misfires, "The Death of Stalin" can be humorous at times. The tempo especially picks up after Steve Buscemi, leading a well-rounded cast, begins to take over as Khrushchev. With him, one moment, joking around with his cohorts that he would just as soon have shot in the head if it were to his Machiavellian interests, Buscemi could just as well be playing his gangster parts in "The Sopranos" or "Boardwalk Empire" than as a would-be national dictator. Meanwhile, the British actors could just as well be enacting a drawing-room comedy of manners or performing a Monty Python sketch (Michael Palin, after all, is here, too, and as absurd as ever). None of this trans-Atlantic cast attempt foreign accents, but what would be the point had they, or had the cast been mainly employed of actors from the former states of the USSR. "The Death of Stalin" doesn't bother to reflect history or politics in profound, or even accurate, ways. It merely reinterprets it all for easy laughs.