"The Death of Stalin" Mirrors "The Rise of [Redacted]"

[TygrBright]

Trailer and links to a couple of relevant reviews below.

Suffice to say, SEE THIS FILM.

Expect to laugh. A lot.

Also, expect to feel that nameless queasy dread that comes with "too close for comfort" satire.

I'll be seeing it again (and again, I suspect) because the script is spangled with tossed-off one-liners fraught with layered meanings. It works on a simple comedy level (the timing is simply exquisite), on a level of political analysis/commentary, and on the level of a profound expose of human nature under pressure.

The casting is perfect and each member of the cast gives an award-worthy performance. There are NO duds or clunkers, no phoned-in bits. Olga Kurylenko, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russel Beale (whom I've loved ever since seeing his "Hamlet" in London in 2000), Michael Palin, Steve Buscemi, Jason Isaacs, Andrea Riseborough... everyone delivers brilliant individual and ensemble performances.

The design is brilliant, veering from muted, twilit chiaroscuro to lushly saturated, hotly-lit luxury interiors. The kind of cinematography, costuming, set design, etc., that leave pictures in your brain.

If you haven't heard about it already, it's loosely based on the events surrounding (duh!) the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, in 1953. What happens when a tyrant who's cajoled, terrorized, invaded and occupied the psyche of a vast and diverse nation, whose caprice, violence, uncontrolled ego and paranoia have destroyed all vestiges of opposition and competence among those surrounding him, suddenly has a paralytic stroke? And then dies?

Let the games begin, as the dregs of the bureaucracy churn in reaction to the vacuum.

Do y'all remember that first, horrifying Cabinet meeting that was televised in early 2017? The one where they went around the table demonstrating their skills in the Competitive Toadying and Buttlicking event?

Well, this film is about what happened when the mirror avatars of Pence, Tillerson, Mnuchin, Ross, et al., after a couple of decades of being enabled and terrorized by their vile master, were suddenly left with all the levers of power over millions of people, and no vile master at all.

The New Yorker review salutes the filmmaker's skill at "making evil funny". They single out Beale's portrayal of State Security chief Beria:

who was as baneful a human as has ever breathed. (He was a serial rapist of young girls, but the film, thank heaven, chooses only to glance at that habit; picture someone so morally squalid that his pedophilia counts as a sideline.)

The New York Times review notes that filmmaker Iannucci is

particularly good at the theater of sycophancy and at all the ways in which supplicating faces, hands and bodies can quiver in fear and with a terrible love.

And that's exactly right. The impact of the film is to some extent predicated on how many uneasy moments of parallel mapping and horrified recognition I experienced, watching the dynamics of bootlicking, equivocating, triangulating, backstabbing, rumor-monging, etc. play out on the screen. Wait, was that movie character or something I just saw on a Sunday morning talking head show?

It's shudderingly creepy as well as uproariously funny.

So, yeah. See it.

encouragingly,
Bright

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. I will be seeing it tomorrow.

I can hardly wait.

I hope that when the DVD comes out it's filled with extras.

[EarlG]

2. Awesome movie

I really liked the decision to have the actors speak with British and American accents/vernacular, instead of having them do dodgy Russian accents. It was weirdly jarring for the first five minutes to hear Khrushchev sound exactly like Steve Buscemi and Stalin as a cockney, but ultimately it made the scenario much more relatable -- "this could happen here" as opposed to "those crazy foreigners and their shenanigans."

[TygrBright]

3. It definitely added to the 'parallel mapping' sensation...

And I particularly liked Jason Isaacs doing Zhukov as a Yorkshire tyke.

I really want this to become a sleeper mega-hit worldwide.

It would piss Putin off richly.

hopefully,
Bright