The Death of Stalin (amazon • iTunes) , the latest film from writer/director Armando Iannucci, is a rollicking farce that is only loosely based on the death of the dictator in question and the mad scramble for power in the vacuum that resulted, with Iannucci moving events and even people around to suit the story. It’s frequently funny in a face-palming sort of way, even when the story is more barely contained chaos than structured plot, and a reminder to me that I need to spend some time with Iannucci’s past and better-known work, including In the Loop and the HBO series Veep.
Stalin appears as a character early in the film, mostly so we can see the rest of the Central Committee playing obsequious Ed McMahons to his Johnny Carson, laughing at nonsensical jokes and trying hard to stay off of Stalin’s legendary enemies lists, people to be rounded up and exiled or, more likely, shot after torturing, with one of the Committee members appearing on the lists the night that Stalin takes ill. (His death is also fictionalized – he did die of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the proximate cause, in the film, is fictional and played for laughs.) After a brief bout of will-he-die-or-won’t-he, he finally kicks it, and the chess game to succeed him starts, except it’s chess as played mostly by people who’ve never played anything more than checkers, except for the scheming Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and the odious Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale). The factions behind these two are fluid, often in a nearly literal sense as when the two sides try to squeeze past each other to be the first to offer emphatic condolences to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough).
The second half of the film, where the real machinations start up, kicks in when the army arrives, led by Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs, chewing scenery left and right), and Khrushchev cooks up his final scheme to wrest control of the Committee for himself by throwing Beria under the bus. From that point, the humor shifts from the almost slapstick, misunderstanding-driven comedy of the first half to a mixture of high- and lowbrow farce, from the game of telephone the leaders all play while standing around Stalin’s casket to the antics of Stalin’s drunken son Vasily (Rupert Friend).
There’s no point in this film where it’s not funny, which saves it from the fact that the plot is rather slapdash and doesn’t hew closely at all to real events. The dialogue never stops, and Iannucci isn’t afraid to mix some bathroom humor (about up to my tolerance for that stuff) in with political gags, notably in the Keystone Kops routine after Stalin’s unconscious but not-dead-yet body is first discovered. The framing of the film around a recorded concert and vengeful pianist doesn’t work well, and some of the other Committee members seem superfluous to both the plot and the comedy, although it was great to see Michael Palin (as Vyacheslav Molotov) on screen again.
The Death of Stalin isn’t a great movie, or a particularly sharp satire, but it is very funny, often with jokes that build on top of each other as scenes become increasingly absurd. (Buscemi’s dance around Tambor at the funeral is beyond description and wonderfully choreographed.) I laughed, often, and then forgot much of the plot once the film ended – and the incongruous if generally accurate ending does burst the comic bubble too. The humor is smart, but the rest of the story doesn’t back up the humor with anything of substance.
The Other Side of Hope.
Note: I’m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I’m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.
I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel’s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I’m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven’t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I’ve ever seen. And that’s before we even talk about the sushi scene.
The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikström and Khaled Ali don’t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikström is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled’s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikström’s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.
The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can’t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn’t do anything. It’s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn’t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurismäki, who also directed 2011’s Le Havre has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn’t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikström plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.
Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikström attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled’s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikström, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.