Not the film I was expecting (2): a review of “The Death Of Stalin”
This is not the film I was expecting. Knowing that it was both written and directed by the British Armando Iannucci who gave us the outrageous delights of “In The Loop”, “The Thick of It” and Veep”, I thought that I was going to encounter a full-blown, satirical comedy (and the trailer had confirmed this impression), but instead – while there are certainly plenty of laughs from a sharp script – this is an altogether darker work, full of foreboding, terror and casual slaughter, than I was anticipating. It is not just the tone that is off-kilter; the brilliant cast makes no attempt to effect a Russian accent but offers everything from a Yorkshire accent to an unashamedly American one. Iannucci has moved from contemporary Whitehall and Washington to take us to Moscow in 1953 but, if we were expecting “Carry On Up The Kremlin”, we have something much more gut-renching and all the more effective.
Several of the characters (the dictator himself played by Adrian McLoughlin) and his eventual successor Khruschev (Steve Buscemi) are known to everyone, but others – like war hero Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) and spy chief Beria (Simon Russell Beale) – will be less-known and still others – such as Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and Molotov (Michael Palin) – will be unfamiliar to many viewers, so you need to be something of an enthusiast for Soviet history to pick up on all the allusions. And real historians will rightly challenge some of the detail because there are some major errors (three of the major characters did not at that time hold the posts attributed to them) although these might be excused as deliberate distorions to enhance the plot.
A few weeks before the release of this film, I was in Georgia and visited Gori, the town near where Stalin was born. The year after Khruschev denounced Stalin, a museum was opened in the town to venerate Stalin’s leadership and essentially (and astonishingly) the messaging remains unchanged to this day. Oh, how I wish they could show this chilling movie at that museum.