Paranoid Lunacy

The Death of Stalin a film by Armando Ianucci.  With Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough.  *****

Imagine working in an administration whose head man ran things entirely by whim.  He liked you one day and didn’t like you the next, and if he didn’t like you he didn’t like the people who associated with you, so you never knew who to associate with from day to day.  The whole administration was full of lies, toadying backbiting, backstabbing.  Paranoia reached epic proportions.  When the man got rid of you, he didn’t just fire you; he threw you into jail, or killed you.  Prisons were full of loud interrogations and gunshots.  There was no rhyme nor reason to any of it.

It’s one of those situations where you laugh to keep from crying.  You laugh to keep from screaming.  The situation is so absurd that it’s actually funny.  Except that people are being tortured and losing their lives.

Such is the world of the brilliant new movie The Death of Stalin, based on a graphic novel which I have not yet put my hands on.  The committee room is peopled by names you’ve heard a million times, except that you’re not sure who’s who or what anyone does.  The one person you keep an eye on, of course, the great arch villain of my youth, is Nikita Khruschev, portrayed by, of all people, Steve Buscemi, in the role of his career.  Eventually, of course, Khruschev will come out on top.  But at the moment he’s one more stumblebum, trying not to say the wrong thing, trying to stay alive.

“I wonder why they made this movie right now,” somebody said as we walked out.

Yeah, I wonder.

The first truly funny moment—in this whole situation where the thing that is funny is not actually funny, except that it is—is when Stalin dies, or at least when he keels over with a stroke.  The guards keeping watch outside his doors hear him fall, but they’re too terrified to do anything.  (Apparently entering the room while Stalin was sleeping was literally punishable by death.)  The loyal woman who brings him his breakfast is the one to discover him.  Soon she notifies various people on the governing committee, and as each one shows up he tries to be more distraught than the others, at the same time trying not to kneel in the puddle of piss beside their ailing leader.  They make a huge show of grief while simultaneously watching their backs.

In the meantime, nobody is doing anything.  They obviously want him to die but want to pretend they don’t, and that they’re taking care of him, just in case he comes around.  The whole committee—in a moment that is like Laurel and Hardy moving that piano up the stairs—carry him into the next room and put him into a bed.  They all want to be part of the effort.  And they all want it to fail.

Which is just as well, because all the good doctors have been sent off to the Gulag or killed.

Stalin’s daughter eventually shows up, the famous Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough), who years later would write a bestselling memoir.  In this moment she’s a young and attractive woman, who seems to have her wits about her; when Khruschev assures her he’ll take care of her, she’ll come to no harm, she immediately turns on him.  Why?  Does someone want to harm me?  Even more of a loose cannon is her brother Vasily (Rupert Friend), a serious alcoholic and semi-lunatic, who says he wants to give a speech at his father’s funeral (to which Khruschev, who is emerging as one of the great comic minds of all time, says, “And I want to fuck Grace Kelly”).  The f-word gets a hell of a workout in this movie.  Never has it been used to better effect.

Comedy reaches new heights in the committee’s subsequent deliberations.  These are men who have spent their whole lives trying to figure out what other people think, what the correct opinion is, what their boss is thinking today.  They’ve gotten to a point where they don’t have opinions, only guesses.  It’s potentially life-threatening to be in opposition to others, so all the hands go up in any vote, but ever so slowly, waiting to see what others will do.  How one person eventually emerged from this situation with the upper hand is anybody’s guess.  In the aftermath of Stalin’s death that looks impossible.

We really see in this situation how close comedy is to tragedy, the way that a truly paranoid regime makes for a theater of the absurd, the way laughing and crying are similar physiological processes, and one can morph into another.  Not since Charlie Chaplin portrayed Hitler playing with that beach ball of a world globe has evil been so funny.  It took nerve to create such a movie, and, alas, it’s been banned in Russia.  They’re missing a comic masterpiece.