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The Death of Stalin - A Black Comic Masterpiece - Don't Make Me Laugh - The Calvert Journal
The Death of Stalin - A Black Comic Masterpiece - Don't Make Me Laugh - The Calvert Journal
The Death of Stalin - A Black Comic Masterpiece - Don't Make Me Laugh - The Calvert Journal
Don’t make me
laugh
Luckily for me, then, The Death of Stalin doesn’t just fall short when it comes to the kind of granular historical and cultural detail that I
might call out; this is a film fundamentally ill equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn’t know it
should be aiming for.
Iannucci’s film is a compressed adaptation of Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s graphic novel of the same name, and details the
immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death from a stroke in March 1953. Before the body is cold, members of the Politburo are scurrying
around in an attempt to shore up their positions in a court suddenly in need of a king. Chief among the scurriers are Moscow Party head
Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and NKVD (secret police) chief Lavrenty Beria (Simon Russell Beale). These two men — the
former effusive and unctuous, the latter composed and brutal — must manipulate a supporting cast of fellow high-rankers, including
Stalin’s hapless deputy Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), hangdog loyalist Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), Stalin’s vaguely
crazed children Svetlana and Vasily (Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend) and a truculent Marshal Zhukov (Jason Isaacs).
Iannucci and longtime co-writer Ian Martin are experienced comedy craftsmen, and this is a fine cast. And while there’s no real suspense
involved (spoiler alert: Khrushchev wins), there’s plenty of material here for a black political farce. So what does Iannucci get so wrong?
First of all, there is the irony that this liberal critique of the historical falsification associated with Stalinism — the end credits play out
over a montage of blacked-out photos — leans heavily on a raft of historical inaccuracies. As has been pointed out elsewhere, at the time
of Stalin’s death, Molotov had long been sacked and Zhukov demoted to the provinces; Beria’s eventual downfall, which the film
squeezes into a few days, actually took several months and was prompted in part by events in East Germany (as always with Iannucci,
the concern is with several shouty men in a room, rather than any wider context). More worryingly, the deaths of about 1,500 people in
crushes around Stalin’s funeral are casually attributed to trigger-happy NKVD officers in order to make a point about the rivalry between
Beria and Khrushchev, an unnecessary, even callous addendum.
This is a film fundamentally ill equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing
marks it doesn’t know it should be aiming for
These inconsistencies can perhaps be justified inasmuch as they help focus the drama. What truly grates, though, is the portrayal of Beria
and the NKVD. The very first subtitle bizarrely tells us that by 1953, Stalin’s “great terror” — i.e., the gruesome purges of 1936-38 —
has been going on for 20 years. This sets the stage for a hackneyed, wearisome depiction of political repression at work, which mainly
seems to consist of Russell Beale’s Beria strolling around the Lubyanka, personally dishing out beatings and orchestrating shootings,
taking time out only to rape young working girls.
Iannucci seems so determined to turn Beria into a throbbing nucleus of evil, an avatar of the obscenities of the Stalinist state, that he
drastically misses both the point of, and the comedy in this system of abuse and privilege. Of course, Beria was an odious sadist, but, as a
friend put it to me, you wouldn’t make a film of the George W. Bush years that had Donald Rumsfeld personally waterboarding
Guantanamo detainees. Iannucci’s approach to satire is simply not transferable to something like Stalinism, because in losing himself in
these reveries of dictatorship, he forgets to say anything about the actual mechanisms of power.
What made The Thick Of It so compelling at its peak was that it grasped the practical reality of Westminster: a series of exasperated
bureaucrats alienated from the consequences of their decisions, caught up in the ever-unspooling process of government. And that is
precisely where the black comedy of Stalinism lies, too — in the fact that faceless pencil-pushers could combine to enact mass death, the
memo a more potent symbol of the system than the rifle, the whole thing a meeting of bland procedural discipline and actual murder.
There is not enough banality in Iannucci’s portrait of evil.
Simon Russell Beale plays Lavrenty Beria, the ruthless head of the secret police
There are other gripes to be had with this film. Why make a cheap gag about gormless peasants forced to sit through a recording of a
Mozart concerto when the Soviet Union of the 1950s was perhaps the most culturally egalitarian state in the world? Why play up Beria’s
alleged sexual violence without tackling such a grim subject seriously? Why not involve more Russians in the production of a film that
could never get made in contemporary Russia? As a comedy, though, it fails the basic test of making what it puts onscreen funny.
The raft of five-star reviews that have greeted The Death of Stalin seem to suggest that this is a masterpiece of gallows humour; for Peter
Bradshaw in The Guardian, it’s “sulphurous”, a “horror-satire”. But for whatever reason — lack of interest in the details of the period,
unwillingness to depart from a proven comedy formula, spurious liberalism — Iannucci and co fail to blend the two ingredients of that
formula. We see horror, and we see satire, but never in conjunction. The result is a lacklustre and tonally confused story about some
awful men being awful to each other. Which is fine, but just maybe, if you want to show your concern for the crimes of Stalinism, you
might make some effort to understand what it actually was. You’d find there’s plenty to laugh and cry about.