The Death of Stalin
Armando Iannucci (2017)
Every so often, a good actor has such a ball with a role – usually a comic role – that their enjoyment is infectious. It’s a treat to watch this kind of turn, even when the film it’s in isn’t very good. Whoopi Goldberg’s performance in Ghost is an example of the phenomenon. Jason Isaacs’s in The Death of Stalin is another. I hoped it might be, having seen the trailer for Armando Iannucci’s latest several times. It’s unusual for me to laugh repeatedly at a bit of trailer – Judi Dench in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice are the only two other recent examples that come to mind – but I laughed each time I watched Isaacs’ Marshal Georgy Zhukov sternly upbraiding Steve Buscemi’s Nikita Khrushchev before making clear it’s a leg-pull. By the time Isaacs made his first appearance in the film proper, about halfway through, I’d failed to raise even a smile but he instantly changed that. Iannucci supplies Isaacs with a great entrance: as Zhukov flexes his broad, bemedalled chest, the camera goes briefly into slow motion to stress and savour his double-alpha-male swagger. To this war hero and military supremo, everyone else in the Politburo is a big girl’s blouse. The Yorkshire accent Isaacs gives him adds to the zing of Zhukov’s barrack-room profanity. It’s a triumphant caricature of a no-nonsense fighting man.
In the climax to the film – the coup d’état which led to the execution of Lavrentiy Beria and the coming to power of Khrushchev – it’s Zhukov who throws what is literally the first punch. Jason Isaacs’s dynamic cartoon means the blow he lands on Beria (Simon Russell Beale) has a zap-pow quality but the subsequent violent treatment of Beria is more realistic and is not the first example of its kind in The Death of Stalin. Shortly after the titular event occurs, a line of gulag prisoners is being executed, one by one: a directive to halt the process arrives midway through the process; the prisoner who was next for the bullet looks with dazed disbelief at the corpse beside him. If this is enough of a visual joke to qualify as black comedy, that’s not the case in a later sequence, when civilians are shot dead by the military in a Moscow street. The screenplay – written by Armando Iannucci with David Schneider and Ian Martin (both previous collaborators) – is adapted from a French graphic novel, La mort de Staline, by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. The graphic novel form, although it doesn’t guarantee tonal consistency, is at least conducive towards it, thanks to sustained visual stylisation. Iannucci’s screen version of Nury and Robin’s material is, for all the absurd behaviour and conversations in evidence, filmed in a broadly realistic style. It’s tempting to accuse The Death of Stalin of being all over the place yet I think Iannucci knows what he’s doing. The jarring shifts of tone seem to me a cheat but I’m sure many viewers will feel they’re getting the best of both worlds – a combination of satirical comedy and serious business. It isn’t, in fact, a combination – it’s an alternation – but it flatters audiences into congratulating themselves that, as well as being easily entertained, they’ve exposed themselves to uncompromising political critique.
The solemnly paranoid reaction of the Russian authorities to the prospect of The Death of Stalin must be beyond Armando Iannucci’s wildest dreams. According to a report in the Guardian a few weeks ago, a senior official in the Ministry of Culture has suggested that the film ‘could be part of a western plot to destabilise Russia by causing rifts in society’ and may therefore be banned. Iannucci should be grateful too to his high-powered actors for reinforcing the film’s semblance of depth. Simon Russell Beale would be perfectly convincing as Beria if this were a straight historical drama yet he’s enormously witty too. Andrea Riseborough, as Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, is an extraordinary mixture of nervous wreck and entitled sulk. In smaller roles, Tom Brooke and Karl Johnson shine (both are mysteriously uncredited in the IMDB cast list, at the time of writing this note). The opening sequence follows a concert performance by the pianist Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko), which has gone out live on Radio Moscow. An unexpected phone call arrives in the broadcast unit – a demand from Stalin for a recording of the Mozart concerto he’s just heard on the wireless. This sends the Radio Moscow director (Paddy Considine) into a flat spin; as his sidekick, Tom Burke is saturnine and maddeningly imperturbable. Karl Johnson plays a doctor called in to determine whether Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), after a brain haemorrhage, is at death’s door. Johnson enriches the absurdist texture of proceedings: he sounds to be channelling Prince Charles.
The large cast also includes Jeffrey Tambor (Georgy Malenkov), Michael Palin (Vyacheslav Molotov), Rupert Friend (Stalin’s son, Vasily) and Paul Whitehouse (Anastas Mikoyan). There isn’t a weak link among them but much of the humour is TV-sketch-show-thin. The running gag of characters changing their minds mid-sentence in order to toe the party line has its moments but doesn’t have the staying power Armando Iannucci seems to assume. If a comedy, even a politically pretentious one, is supposed to make you laugh, The Death of Stalin is a comedy only when Jason Isaacs is on the screen.
22 October 2017