The Death of Stalin review: Carry on Kremlin

Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci is one of the greatest satirists of his generation but can his new dark farce about the Soviet scramble for power in 1953 live up to expectation?
Matthew Norman13 November 2017

In that old equation “comedy equals tragedy plus time”, the comic and tragic are constants and the variable is time. How long must elapse before it becomes acceptable to laugh at unspeakable cruelty?

Caligula’s penchant for using senators as human torches to light garden parties didn’t cause a run on ribcage repair kits in ancient Rome but at some point over the next two millennia it acquired a certain gruesome hilarity.

Joseph Stalin died in 1953 having ruled the Soviet Union with staggering ruthlessness for three decades, in which he transformed an agrarian society into an industrialised superpower and killed and caused to die, through bullet and famine, comrades literally beyond counting. The estimates range up from 20 million.

In his native Georgia, and among the more nationalistic strata of Russian society, he is the hero of heroes. For many others he ranks alongside Hitler in the pantheon of tyrannical monsters.

But one thing Stalin has never been, until now, is a slightly fey, senescent Kray-style hood. This is how director and co-writer Armando Iannucci presents him in The Death of Stalin. “You wanna know what f***ing broken is?” he menaces quivering associates in his “Beffnal Green” brogue. “You wanna go there?”

A stroke leaves the dictator comatose and unattended on his dacha sitting room floor — even then his guards are too scared of him to intervene, while he has dispatched every decent doctor in Moscow to the gulag.

Whether or not 64 years are too few to transform the tragic into the comic, Iannucci isn’t trying to wring laughs out of suffering. As in The Thick of It and Veep, he is satirising the venality and rank incompetence of the power-hungry, the self-serving hypocrisies beneath their glib political philosophising, and the chaos in which they operate.

My problem — and worshipping Iannucci as a demigod, these words don’t come easily — is not with time but with the comedy. For all his dream-team cast and assured direction, despite capturing the laughable sycophancy of the apparatchik the film isn’t that funny.

It begins adroitly by establishing the paralysing fear and latent absurdities generated by Stalin with laconic ease. When the music-loving dictator requests a record of a Mozart concerto he has heard on the radio the broadcast’s director (Paddy Considine) is mortified to discover that it wasn’t recorded. He rounds up the departing orchestra for a repeat and sends secret police to collect a replacement conductor for the one now missing but needs another full house to replicate the sound quality. “I could get my wife,” a colleague tells him. “She’d dampen the acoustic,” he replies.

Although it made me laugh, that twist on the marginally retrograde “My wife’s so fat…” proved a signpost to the unexpected broadness of Iannucci’s script. The island of urine in which Stalin lay prone after the stroke may be historical fact but we all know mortal illness is a dignity-stripping equaliser and milking it for cheap laughs felt less like Iannucci than Sacha Baron Cohen at his most lazily scatalogical.

The Death of Stalin, in pictures

1/7

Once Stalin is dead his closest colleagues scrap farcically in the battle to succeed him. A bald Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev — spoiler alert for those unfamiliar with history: Khrushchev won, eventually — as a tremulous New Jersey hood. A purposely badly bewigged Jeffrey Tambor plays Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s nominal deputy, a malleable buffoon. Michael Palin’s Vyacheslav Molotov is so petrified of unorthodoxy that he condemns his wife for treason in ignorance of her pardon.

Shining brightest among this luminous cast is Simon Russell Beale, a theatrical giant on a too-rare screen break, who invests Stalin’s poisonous security chief Lavrentiy Beria with the ideal mix of the slimy and the sinister.

Andrea Riseborough gives a droll turn as Svetlana, Stalin’s neurotic daughter, and Rupert Friend brings drunken swagger to his wastrel son Vasily. But why Jason Isaacs plays Red Army chief Georgy Zhukov as a crude parody of Yorkshire bluffness I cannot say. Perhaps Palin’s presence put him in mind of that Four Yorkshireman sketch?

That jars, and so at times does the script. In The Thick of It, Iannucci melded laser-like observational precision with sharp, sparse dialogue to illuminate the grubby smallness of the supposedly mighty. Here, he uses a blunt instrument to batter the point home rather than the surgeon’s scalpel to carve it out. Vasily’s screeched, “You’re not a man, you’re nothing but a testicle” is closer to Rik Mayall’s sledgehammer invective in Bottom than Malcolm Tucker’s inventive stiletto.

There are a few belly laughs in the first hour and some vignettes to relish such as the rivals’ wheezy dash to ingratiate themselves with Svetlana when she arrives at the dacha. But though it ends on an sombre transience-of-power note the film’s prevailing tone — Carry On Up the Kremlin, with a modern history MA — had me wondering if the late Charles Hawtrey would pitch up to milk the coughing-fit mirth as Ivor Chestikov.

That may be unfair to a movie which is by and large historically accurate (albeit the historian Richard Overy has pointed out a few errors). Yet faithfulness to the facts is a marginal asset for a satirical film in which — this once, and God willing just this once — the greatest satirist of his generation seems curiously to lack faith in himself.

Cert 15, 106 mins

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