The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin is a large-scale historical epic directed by the British film maker Armando Ianucci.  The 2018 film seems to have involved complex funding -- the movie is produced primarily by the French studio Gaumont (it's logo now says "born with the movies"), but a variety of other production companies are also credited, including the Belgium Tax Shelter enterprise and Canal.  The picture is derived from a French comic book -- that is, a graphic novel or, in this case, a graphic history.  The actors (with one exception) are all Brits who speak with rich plummy accents -- a little disconcerting, at first, but, then, quite acceptable.  The exception is Steve Buscemi who plays Nikita Krushchev, a curious casting choice but also very effective:  he seems a feckless schlemihl at first, but, then, grows in sinister stature as the movie progresses.  Conspicuous by their absence are any Russian actors, again with one exception -- a beautiful female pianist has a Russian name and she looks the way you imagine Natasha in War and Peace.  The film covers some of the territory claimed by Alexei German's great Krushtalyov, My Car, a picture that dwarfs all other films and that, of course, puts Ianucci's picture to shame.  That said, Ianucci's film is surprisingly lavish -- it's like Dr. Zhivago, full of trains disgorging panicked Russians, rife with murders, assassinations, and riots.  The movie seems to have been partially filmed in the Kremlin and there are images containing what seem to be hundreds of thousands of people, simple Russians in mourning for Stalin.  The great monster lies in State in the Hall of Columns where there is much antic byplay among the lesser monsters vying for control of the State and the set, if it is one, seems astonishingly accurate and detailed.  Ianucci's film is a sort of screwball comedy of horrors -- the various Soviet officials all talk as fast as possible, spewing forth every sort of Baroque threat and insult, and its all quite amusing in an awful sort of way.  On reflection, the current film that the movie most resembles is Yorgi Lanthimos' perverse The Favorite.  The similarity resides in the fact that The Death of Stalin lovingly recreates the interiors and Kremlin locations where the events shown apparently transpired:  everything looks scrupulously authentic, but the actors speak in like characters in an exceptionally bawdy episode of Seinfeld (or like the people in Veep, which is, I think, connected in some way to Ianucci).  In The Favorite, everything looks convincingly like the Court of Queen Anne in the age of Alexander Pope -- but, again, the people speak like mobsters in a modern crime film.  This is an interesting strategy and gives these films an electric charge.  I'm not a big fan of a lot of Ianucci's invective -- it just seems gratuitous:  he has people speak in a way that is as affected and unreal as Shakespearian iambic pentameter except that it's not uplifting, just a cacophony of the wildest and most outlandish insults and threats.  In one scene, for example, a character denounces someone else in these terms:  "You're not even a man.  You're a testicle."  But the description doesn't make any sense, isn't even arguably metaphorically accurate, and just seems gratuitous and, in fact, more than a little stupid.  (In defense of the film, it should be observed that the character who makes this proclamation is an alcoholic idiot.)

Ianucci doesn't stint on horrors.  There are plenty of scenes in dank NKVD torture chambers and many people shot point-blank in the head.  Beria, the film's one unequivocal villain, orders people to torture wives in the presence of their husbands, merrily telling one henchman:  "Shoot the wife first and make sure he sees it before you shoot him."  (Beria also seems to be some sort of child molester -- we see him with little blonde girls; this is creepy and disrupts the cynical merriment that is the tone for most of the movie.) Supernumerary characters are killed just because they are in the same room where something important happened and no one wants any witnesses around.  Stalin, an ineffectual-seeming little fellow looks like everyone's favorite uncle -- he tells inane jokes to his inner circle, the same verminous crew that we see contending against one another after his death.  He makes his boys watch a John Ford Western, apparently for the tenth time -- some of them fall asleep.  If you make a verbal slip, Stalin apparently will have you killed and, so, all his courtiers seem desperate to please him.  Indeed, everyone in the whole country is desperate to please the tyrant -- when Stalin misses a radio broadcast of a Mozart piano concerto, he demands a recording.  But the studio staff hasn't recorded the broadcast and, so, the whole program has to be redone -- the conductor has passed-out from fear and so another man has to be recruited in his pajamas to direct the orchestra.  The pianist is a Christian; Stalin has killed all of her family and so she doesn't care about her own fate.  She sends a written note to the dictator denouncing him and Stalin gets a big laugh out of it before collapsing on the floor in a puddle of his own urine, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage -- Ianucci's cinema is a theater of cruelty:  we see Stalin's skull sawed open, his face peeled down to expose the bone, and his brain exposed.  (It's a rather pointless sequence.)  Stalin's death induces a violent power struggle between Krushschev and Malenkov (played by a baffled-looking Jeffrey Tambor), Stalin's anointed successor.  Ultimately, Krushschev outflanks the hapless Malenkov by summoning both the war hero General Zhukov and the public to Stalin's funeral -- this result in a massacre:  the NKVD has shut down the city and they shoot into the crowds of mourners killing 1500 people.  Zhukov stages a coup for the benefit of Krushschev and Beria is beaten half to death, shot in the face, and his corpse doused in petrol and set on fire.  In the final scene, we see Krushschev at the concert listening to the same piano concerto with which the film began -- behind him his murderous successor Leonid Brezhnev looks on hungrily.  Some aspects of the film are unsettling:  Molotov (Michael Palin) is so badly broken by his fear of Stalin that he has denounced his own wife and, even after the Beria sets the woman free, continues to denounce her reflexively.  Stalin's children are pathetic enough:  his son Vassily is a moron and a drunk; Svetlana wants Beria to bring back her boyfriend who has been sent to the Gulag.   At last, Beria has to apologize, admitting he had the military officer killed in 1949.  Vast numbers of peasants come to Moscow, convinced that Stalin was a great man and their benefactor.  It's all very funny and also horrific -- you feel a little ashamed of yourself for laughing at this stuff.  (The extras on the DVD note that the film was made before anyone thought that Donald Trump would become president, but, if you want, there are certain parallels -- an inane remark that doesn't do justice to what we see in the film.)