The Death of Stalin (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆

The Death of Stalin (2017) – A. Iannucci

It’s an unusual experiment for a film to treat the totalitarian days of the Soviet Union as broad comedy – and more unusual still because the details of the plot (if not the screenplay full of jokes) are drawn straight from the real facts of the historical record about bad actors, torture, murder.  This satirical portrayal of a bunch of bumblers (the Central Committee) who need to manage the country after their leader has died – and who vie to determine its political direction and methods – was, inevitably, banned in Russia.  It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.  But strangely, the slickness of the film and the deftness of the comedic actors and their witty repartee means that the brutality of the proceedings (implied and explicit) seems unreal – when in fact it all was horribly real.  Even the decision to allow the actors to use their natural accents (a full range of British classes are represented plus Steve Buscemi and Jeffrey Tambor from America), which could have been a Brechtian device to lead us to view the characters and their actions from a more distanced critical perspective, doesn’t quite have that intended effect (although perhaps there is a different goal; for example, portraying Stalin as the rural type from Georgia he was by using a cockney accent).   At any rate, it is a pitch black comedy, very probably in completely bad taste, and without a clearly identifiable modern target (only a desire to recreate and satirize the chaos of the period).