‘The Death of Stalin’ Is a Hilarious (and Dark) Scramble for Power

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What to Stream This Weekend

MOVIE: The Death of Stalin
DIRECTOR: Armando Iannucci
CAST: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Ruper Friend, Jason Isaacs
AVAILABLE ON: Amazon Prime and iTunes

For whatever reason (ahem), there have been many discussions these last two years about how best to deal with villainy through comedy. Is it actually possible for comedic takedowns of figures in power to have any kind of positive benefit, or does attention just feed the beast and antagonism merely further entrench said beast’s supporters. One of the few modern talents to have cracked that particular nut had been Armando Iannucci, the Scottish satirist who created Veep for HBO. Since the beginning, Veep has been the most devastating piece of political humor, depicting our great political overclass as a scrambling parade of venal, amoral buffoons. Veep is able to so successfully pillory Washington D.C. because of its deliberate lack of specificity; Selina Meyer deals with neither real-world figures nor real-world events. Iannucci’s 2009 film In the Loop cut a bit closer to the bone, depicting a series of negotiations between American and British political figures over how to proceed with military action in the Middle East. The characters were still fictional, but the stakes were real, as were their comparisons to the all-too-real wars being undertaken.

With The Death of Stalin, Iannucci makes his boldest stab yet at satirizing figures in power, depicting the 1953 crisis of power in the Soviet Union that followed the titular death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier whose reign of terror had been going on in Russia since 1922. In his trademark way, Iannucci depicts a circle of cranky, opportunistic, thoroughly amoral members of the Central Committee, all of them quickly scrambling to make sure they have a seat when the music stops playing. There’s Nikita Khrushchev (Buscemi), least outwardly awful but shrewd; Georgy Malenkov (Tambor), a vain buffoon; Vyacheslav Molotov (Palin), who hours before Stalin’s death had been placed on a kill list for offending Stalin in some way or another. Simon Russell Beale, perhaps best known in America for his role in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, plays Lavrenity Beria, depicted as the most outwardly Machievellian of Stalin’s inner circle. Having administered the program of arrests and executions that terrorized all possible dissent, Beria now just as quickly wants Malenkov to liberalize in order to gain popular favor. Meanwhile, Khrushchev is suspicious of this power play, which is to say nothing of the military, led by Marshall Zhukov (Isaacs). And that’s all aside from Stalin’s children, the emotionally fragile Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) and the ineffectually belligerent Vasily (Rupert Friend).

Iannucci gets a lot of mileage out of villainy done by committee. It’s a common theme in his work. The bumbling, frantic, profane work by his characters to get themselves into advantageous position is so often in service of things like war, assassination, intimidation. Evil has never seemed so banal. When Beria and Malenkov discover Stalin, incapacitated by a stroke, Malenkov is paralyzed by indecision. Later, though, when the inner circle makes a plan to find a doctor — all the good doctors having been sent to the gulag and all — and they settle on intimidating one women into giving up the location of doctors in hiding, then resolving to kill the woman if it all goes wrong. “See?” Malenkov says, happy and relieved. “We’re better as a committee.”

There is a darkness around the edges of everything that happens here, befitting the fact that there are decades of bloody history that are impossible to sweep away. It feels jarring, at first, to see the actual work of bloody violence happen inside what we’ve come to feel as the safety of Iannucci’s vulgar playhouse. He keeps reminding us: this stuff had consequences; these things happened.

Which makes it all the more impressive that The Death of Stalin is as funny as it is. It’s not the pillar-to-post festival of quotable insults that In the Loop was, but the steady burn of shameless scheming and posturing really delivers. The moment when Beria and Khrushchev race towards a just-arrived Svetlana, competing to be first in line to comfort her in her grief, is hilariously grotesque. The performances are typically top notch, with Beale, Riseborough, and a riotous Friend as the highlights. Ultimately, Vasily is peripheral to the events of the story, but every interlude of his short-tempered, pompous existence is, in the hands of the unexpectedly hilarious Rupert Friend, absolutely riotous.

Ultimately, Iannucci’s movie leaves things on a darkly prophetic note. Treachery will reap what it has sown. In the case of the succession of Soviet leadership, one good coup will undoubtedly beget another. It’s not exactly optimism he leaves us with, but in an era where villainy does in fact seem to keep prevailing, it’s satisfying to watch them stumble and scramble for our amusement, if only for a while.

Where to stream The Death of Stalin