Armando Iannucci's hard satire swings between gallows humour and the real gallows as the fallout from the death of Stalin hurtles downward through the ranks. Why bother doing this now? Couldn't someone have come up with it in the '50s when it was a fresher story? Political muscling, whether self avowed or not, doesn't easily regenerate without a contest of people near the top who want themselves to be where the boss was. You can extend that to the bizarre state of information bending and bullet dodging of elected officials here and now. Stalin and his crew set themselves to reality redefinition as though it were Sunday lunch and everyone knew what happened to anyone who might cry: "but you said...!"
The mind who gave us Veep, The Thick of It, and In the loop knows that there are times when satire need only be applied as a thin sheen over reality. With the event of the title of this film Ianucci has, if anything, only to restrain himself until the emergent truth of its chaos appears. The Stalin story is particularly poignant as it brought up the confusion that occurs when succession raises its head after the death of an autocrat. Who goes next? The party light or the relative? Did this roll the sequence from Tsar a full circle to a replacing autocrat?
In the end, after all the brutality and paranoia, Ianucci delivers us from gut punch to belly laugh without ever having to err into cuteness or over-earnestness. That along with a dream cast and some great comic timing, gets us here to where the lampoon meets the wall.
Join me, won't you?
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