An English Drawing Room Tragedy - Set in Moscow -- You're Kidding, Right?

Rating: 4/10 (19 April 2018)

This film is like a jigsaw puzzle assembled from the partial contents of three or four completely different boxes. The effect is quite peculiar. Some of the edges come together fairly smoothly, but many others overlap in a very bizarre fashion, indeed.
First, the film is rooted in English humor. The English bathe in humor; it's a constant in England as away of coping with disappointment with other people and with the system.
But it doesn't necessarily travel well. Personally, as an American, it struck me as unfunny from the very first scenes. It made me squirm, not chuckle. Throughout the film, very little hit target.
More to the point, though, it's not Russian. The class-bound English depend on etiquette and formality to get along with each other. Russians are much more earthy and spontaneous. When we witness "Russians" behaving like proper middle-class Englishmen and women, it jars our sensibilities and seems unreal.
Second, Iannucci draws on the genre of drawing room farce to bear the burden of brutality and tragedy. However, comedy depends on the convention that the heroes are never really harmed. As applied to the monstrous crimes of Stalin and the Soviet system, Iannucci's brand of humor doesn't seem elastic enough. How to square the circle? Iannucci has not figured it out.

Third, the director provides no avenue into the film; he keeps the audience at a distance. A comic, they say, is a frustrated idealist. People don't measure up. That is why comics in real life are invariably angry at everyone and hard to get along with. The audience, in turn, senses the anger under the humor.
Also, as paradoxical as it may seem, the leaders and many, though by no means all, of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union maintained a certain idealism. They knew they were committing horrors, but they justified them in the name of the future. Vain, yes; power-mad, yes; absurd, yes; but also devoted. Unfortunately, though Iannucci does convey a bit of this in Khrushchev's part, it doesn't pervade the mentality of the action. Consequently, it's as though the characters are suspended in air with nothing supporting them.