clever and insightful, but not as funny as it tries to be

Rating: 4/10 (19 March 2018)

"The Death of Stalin" (R, 1:46) is a British political satire comedy, co-written and directed by Armando Iannucci, based on a French graphic novel, about the events leading up to, surrounding and immediately following the 1953 demise of Joseph Stalin, the long-time leader of the U.S.S.R. You might well wonder whether the violence of the Soviet dictator's regime would be appropriate fodder for a comedy film, or whether such a comedy could even work. Fair questions and, after watching this film, I'd say valid ones.
The film opens with a dinner party thrown by Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) and attended by his inner circle of Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov (Golden Globe and Emmy winners Steve Buscemi and Jeffrey Tambor), Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and Vyacheslav Molotov (Monty Python veteran Michael Palin). During that gathering, Stalin causes a minor panic by in a concert hall by personally asking for a recorded copy of that night's performance, and panic also comes to various individuals around Moscow as Stalin's security forces go after those on his most recent enemies list, as published by Beria. All of this tells us a lot about the main characters and Stalin's regime and nicely sets the stage for what is to come.
The rest of the movie concerns itself with the titular event and its aftermath, focusing on the comical inefficiency of the Soviet regime and backstabbing among its high-ranking officials. After the aforementioned dinner party, after Stalin reads some hate mail sent to him by an idealistic and gutsy musician (Olga Kurylenko), then has a medical episode and collapses. Over the next 12 hours or so, Stalin's personal security detail, various government officials and a motley crew of doctors who are eventually called, all bungle their responses and Stalin dies. Then Stalin's children, a naïve drama queen (Andrea Riseborough) and an unhinged alcoholic (Emmy nominee Rupert Friend) show up, adding to the mayhem, followed quickly by the self-important Soviet Army chief, Field Marshall Zhukov (Jason Isaacs). Meanwhile, the men in the dead dictator's inner circle jockey for power and scheme against each other.
"The Death of Stalin" is clever, but not as funny as it wants to be. The movie tries to walk the fine line between taking the events it depicts somewhat seriously and showing the ridiculousness of the Soviet system in the early-mid 1950s and the men who ran it. The film walks that line well, but in doing so, fails to be very entertaining. The tragic historical facts of Stalin's murderous regime and the way its inefficiency fueled the Cold War with the United States makes the jokes less funny, but the nods to the seriousness of those situations keep the jokes from going far enough to be funnier. Despite the excellent cast, that middle-of-the-road approach to making a comedy about Stalin's death results in a middle-of-the-road grade from me, teetering on the edge of whether to recommend this movie or not... but barely coming down on the side of not. "C+"