Authoritarian regimes, domestic and otherwise, are fueled by fear. When the dictator in question is known for purges, show trials, imprisonment and murder, the fear lives on after the tyrant is dead. Power vacuums must be filled, loose ends tied up.
If this doesn't sound like the stuff of comedy, you're not familiar with Armando Iannucci. The man behind The Thick of It, In the Loop and HBO's long-running Veep is the reigning master of political humor, a surgical deflator of egos and power. With the savagely funny The Death of Stalin, he has merely upped the ante. He has shifted from skewering the workings of democracy to lampooning dictatorial toadies. The Death of Stalin is actually a lot like Veep, except with gulags and executions.
Iannucci, working from a graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, sets up the jostling and jockeying early and efficiently. Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) is Stalin's loyal but ineffectual deputy. Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale) is the ruthless head of the Soviet secret police, the keeper of the death lists. Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), whose name even casual students of history should recognize, is the savvy, ornery statesman who keeps his cards close.
Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) falls ill and then dies in the film's first act, and it's off to the realpolitik races. Nobody trusts each other, even as they try to form alliances for the sake of self-preservation. The thuggish Beria adopts a reformist façade, freeing prisoners and currying public favor. Malenkov tries to assume the position of a powerful leader, for which he is woefully inadequate. Khruschev complains a lot and cozies up to a blustering military strongman (Jason Isaacs). He seems to be playing the long game.
The Death of Stalin plays like a Shakespeare history play crossbred with a particularly profane Marx Brothers comedy. As Stalin lies dying in his own urine, his comrades try not to step in it. They need to find a doctor, but all the good ones are in the gulag. Insults flow like the blood of Stalin's innumerable enemies. Nobody escapes with dignity intact, which is par for Iannucci's course.
The filmmaker's most daring gambit here is matching the scabrous tone of his earlier work to a grisly chapter of historical terror. Iannucci knows that few things deflate unchecked power with the incisiveness of barbed ridicule. But he also knows his story won't work if he doesn't make his monsters human, and in some cases even sympathetic. His comedy is uncomfortable, but never lazy. It's designed to make you squirm through your laughter.
None of it would work without the right cast. Buscemi plays Khrushchev like a scheming New York political machine boss, and the fact that he never relinquishes his Brooklyn accent gives the film a distancing effect that Brecht would appreciate. In addition to Tambor, Beale and Isaacs, Michael Palin is perfect as Vyacheslav Molotov, the Stalin protégé whose life is actually spared by the old man's passing. Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough add to the chaos as Stalin's adult children.
The laughter is acidic, befitting the subject matter. The Death of Stalin showcases comedy as a weapon of ideas, a sharp stick to prod the tenuousness of ill-gotten power. The target in this case belongs to the dustbin of history, but the mad scramble for control and the drive to keep it ring through the ages and the world. The stakes are high in The Death of Stalin. Thankfully, so is the payoff.
