The Death of Stalin

Every tyrant, given enough time or a safe distance, presents as a clown.

Chaplin had Hitler's number even as most of Hollywood pursued a path of appeasement; figures such as Saddam Hussein and North Korea's dynastic Kims make easy targets for stand-up comics. Absent authoritarianism, human beings would have less need of comedy.

Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci deserves to be called a satirist. He's the wicked imagination behind HBO series Veep as well as the brilliant 2009 film In the Loop, a fictionalized farce about the runup to the Iraq War.

In his blackly funny The Death of Stalin, as in those projects, he uses cinema verite techniques and works closely with a team of writers (David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows) to create a kind of hyper-reality. Veep, I've been told by reliable sources, strikes much closer to the heart of Washington treachery than the fanciful soap opera House of Cards.

Working from graphic novels by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, Iannucci and company pick and choose from agreed-upon facts, rumor and alternate histories in constructing their (Groucho) Marxian tale of power vortexes and the tiny men who try to fill them.

It is March 1953 and Soviet strongman Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) is drinking vodka, watching John Wayne movies and kicking it with his bros from the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party -- guys like sycophantic Molotov (Michael Palin), ineffectual Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), dangerous Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and canny Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) -- at his modest (for a dictator) dacha outside Moscow.

After they disperse and return to their apartments in the Stalinskie Vysotki -- the skyscrapers Stalin ordered built after the Great Patriotic War because he thought Moscow's skyline needed a little oomph -- the boss tunes into Radio Moscow, where he's so touched by a Mozart recital he orders a recording to be delivered that evening.

The problem is, the broadcast wasn't recorded, so the orchestra is reassembled and -- after the original conductor is incapacitated -- a gulag-bound substitute is called in to oversee the proceedings in his pajamas. Babushkas and peasants are pulled in from off the street to replicate the acoustics. And then the piano player -- Olga Kurylenko, playing historical figure Maria Yudina -- refuses to go on because of her grievances with the dictator. So they bribe her to play and press a single record of the performance. And Yudina slips a personal message to the dictator inside the record jacket.

While I'm not inclined to fact-check the entire movie, it's interesting to compare Iannucci's script with the apocryphal story related in the alleged memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. In that version, Stalin heard Yudina playing Mozart's Piano Concerto 23 on the radio in 1944 and demanded a copy. And since that broadcast hadn't been recorded, Radio Moscow managers dispatched a car to Yudina's home to wake her and return her to the studio to record the concerto.

We can't prove that didn't happen, but it is established fact that Yudina was a consistent critic of the Soviet regime; she was thrown out of Petrograd Conservatory in 1930 for voicing her dissent and for a time lived on the streets. Several times during her career she was banned from performing or recording.

Anyway, when Stalin receives the recording, Yudina's note flutters out. He reads it, roars with laughter and is immediately struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage. The next morning he's discovered by a housekeeper and members of the committee descend to decide what to do about "the boss" who, having soiled himself, lies unconscious on the floor. You see, all the good doctors have been sent to the gulag. And Stalin isn't likely to reward those who remanded him to the care of quacks. But as pajama-clad Khrushchev (an allusion to Animal Crackers?) points out, Stalin's unlikely to recover from the care of a bad doctor.

Even before the title event arrives, brutal Beria has begun scheming to consolidate his place as the de facto leader of the country, though weak Malenkov, who "can't remember who's alive and who isn't" will be the front man. He's opposed by Khrushchev, the most decent (or least horrific) of this gang, who seems genuinely committed to the de-Stalinization programs Beria cynically adopts as a path to popularity.

One of the few college classes I remember with acuity was a fascinating history of the Soviet Union that took as one of its prime texts Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror; what the casual moviegoer should know is that in addition to snappy screwball dialogue and unflinching willingness to insult (Khrushchev's dismissal of Orthodox bishops as "boyfriends of Christ" being among the more printable bon mots dropped), The Death of Stalin features at least three remarkable performances:

As Beria, Beale -- a London stage actor with only a handful of movie credits -- is otter sleek and perverse, delivering his lines in an upper-class British accent that counter-intuitively serves to remind us of the enormity of the Soviet state and the diversity of its people. He melds a Nabokovian intelligence with a terrible capacity for violence -- it says something that while the historical pedophilia of Beria is only alluded to in the script, we might accept as one of this character's lesser vices. ("Shoot her first but make sure he sees it," Beria calmly instructs an officer going out to dispatch a few enemies of the state.)

And Buscemi is just brilliant as pragmatic Khrushchev, who has his wife keep track of which jokes Stalin smiled at and which he suffered. His Brooklyn accent suggests an urban if not quite urbane character who knows that to do any good at all he has to survive.

But my favorite turn is delivered by delightful Jason Isaacs as Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the war hero and favorite of Dwight Eisenhower, who took great pride in personally arresting Beria and (if Iannucci's version is to be believed) punching Stalin's drunken son Vasily, played by an enjoyably unhinged Rupert Friend, in the face. Powered by a growling country accent -- better ears than mine have assigned it to Yorkshire -- and a booming mien, this Zhukov emerges as a rough, implacable force of nature. He was said to be the only man who could stand up to Stalin and tell him the truth.

"To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed -- there is nothing sweeter in the world," Stalin once allegedly said. Zhukov fell in disfavor with his boss often over the years, but he never made it onto one of those lethal lists -- maybe because Stalin was afraid of him. The members of the Central Committee certainly are.

Despite the period costumes, The Death of Stalin feels slyly contemporary. Because while tyrants might appear more or less charming, their essential nature never changes.

MovieStyle on 04/20/2018