The Death of Stalin (2017)
Directed by Armando Iannucci
When dictator Joseph Stalin dies, his parasitic cronies square off in a frantic power struggle to become the next Soviet leader. As they bumble, brawl and back-stab their way to the top, the question remains — just who is running the government?
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14 films that influenced The Death of Stalin
What critics say influenced The Death of Stalin
There’s an attention to period detail reminiscent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Life of Brian (Michael Palin also pops up in the cast) and none of the stiffness or hindsight of bad historical storytelling.
So The Death of Stalin is akin to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, then?
Presenting… Monty Python’s production of George Orwell’s 1984.
There is real grotesquerie too in the early scene of Stalin and his closest comrades, eating, drinking and chest-bumping together, behaving like the senior pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Perhaps not since Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire The Great Dictator has a filmmaker taken on such awful personalities and events and attempted to make us laugh about it all.
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This is just the opening movement to a grand satire driven by profound cynicism about self-obsessed leaders — “Duck Soup” with real dictators.
Yet its bleakness is offset by its anarchic spirit, which summons up the ghosts of Duck Soup, Million Dollar Legs, and other screwball skewerings of authoritarianism.
It’s not easy to find humour in the horrible, but if the definition of comedy truly is tragedy plus time then the likes of The Producers can illustrate that when barbarity is made to look ridiculous it’s a powerful political statement.
Call it the Young Frankenstein Principle, and the fact that this film warrants comparison to that one should be all the recommendation you need.
It’s the difference between “Richard III” and “The Mouse That Roared,” where tragedy proves far more damning than farce.
From Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Oliver Stone’s JFK to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s controversial Hitler flick Downfall (poor Adolf, in that bunker and everything), the sudden exit of an iconic political figure, be they benevolent or tyrannical, offers rich material for storytellers.
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Here, the movie’s odd stew of accents (some American, others British, with Jason Isaacs performing his bearish general — a fresh spin on James Gandolfini’s “Loop” bully — in a thick Yorkville accent) makes for an inconsistent mix, devolving into the sort of general pandemonium found at the end of “Casino Royale” and various Mel Brooks movies, when you half-expect the cinema to catch fire.
Denzel Washington’s Fences feels very much like a filmed version of an August Wilson production and it’s dead boring outside of the caliber of its lead performances, but Iannucci succeeds where so many s have failed by making the audience a participant.