A Morte de Stalin

This is an excellent film. And its treatment of the Stalin Era of the Soviet Union is both darkly humorous and actually very unflinching in its depicting the monsters and their monstrosities for what they were.

I was worried that, in an attempt to extract humor from the situation that they might've glossed over just how monstrous the key characters actually were. To Iannucci and Schneider's credit however, there was absolutely no glossing over at all. Beria, for instance, is portrayed as every bit the monster in human form that he was - this, even as that portrayal is also made darkly and delightfully humorous at times.

The whole cast played their parts well and played them "straight" - which only heightened the humor and the horror of what life was like under Stalin in the Soviet Union. Even the nominal "hero" of the tale, Nakita Khrushchev, is realistically portrayed as being just as conniving and callous and power hungry as everyone else. Buscemi would seem an odd choice for that particular role but he pulls it off with style and excellence. So too does Simon Russell Beale in his portrayal of Beria.

This is a nicely done film with excellent production values, a great script, fine acting, excellent pacing, and a compelling tale that is well told.

I highly recommend it!

You might think The Death of Stalin was a parody or a black comedy or a farce. We know that the actors are playing actual people some of whom lived until the late 1980s. The weird thing is the actual events depicted in the movie happened in some form.

In real life, when Stalin was lying on the floor in his soiled pajamas after he suffered a stroke. They needed to call a meeting to decide whether to call a doctor. Stalin's personal physician was unavailable as he was being tortured at the time for suggesting Stalin needed more bed rest.

Armando Iannucci mines comedy gold in an absurd, surreal, darkly violent tale of who wants to be the next leader of the Soviet Union. It is not a historical tale, it is a story of what can happen in any society where dogma and the bullet become the main currencies.

This is not the film I was expecting. Knowing that it was both written and directed by the British Armando Iannucci who gave us the outrageous delights of "In The Loop", "The Thick of It" and Veep", I thought that I was going to encounter a full-blown, satirical comedy (and the trailer had confirmed this impression), but instead - while there are certainly plenty of laughs from a sharp script - this is an altogether darker work, full of foreboding, terror and casual slaughter, than I was anticipating. It is not just the tone that is off-kilter; the brilliant cast makes no attempt to effect a Russian accent but offers everything from a Yorkshire accent to an unashamedly American one.

Several of the characters (the dictator himself played by Adrian McLoughlin) and his eventual successor Khruschev (Steve Buscemi) are known to everyone, but others - like war hero Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) and spy chief Beria (Simon Russell Beale) - will be less-known and still others - such as Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and Molotov (Michael Palin) - will be unfamiliar to many viewers, so you need to be something of an enthusiast for Soviet history to pick up on all the allusions. And real historians will rightly challenge some of the detail because there are some major errors (although these might rather be deliberate distortions to enhance the plot). Iannucci has moved from contemporary Whitehall and Washington to take us to Moscow in 1953 but, if we were expecting "Carry On Up The Kremlin", we have something much more gut-wrenching and all the more effective.

A few weeks before the release of this film, I was in Georgia and visited Gori, the town near where Stalin was born. The year after Khruschev denounced Stalin, a museum was opened in the town to venerate Stalin's leadership and essentially (and astonishingly) the messaging remains unchanged to this day. Oh, how I wish they could show this chilling movie at that museum.

... and yet this film does just that. It revolves around the power struggle that occurs at the death of Stalin in 1953, a man who had an iron grip on Russia for 30 years and enforced his will with terror, often randomly.

So when the sycophants who surround him are suddenly bereft of his soul, they are all jockeying for power while finding it very difficult to do the one thing that would get you tortured and killed as long as they can remember - independent thinking, or even making suggestions for that matter. A simple show of hands vote becomes a hilarious demonstration of group think. They all have a collective case of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Stalin, still afraid of a man who is dead.

Jeffrey Tambor is doing his character Hank from the 90s sitcom "The Larry Sanders Show", and Steve Buschemi, as Nikita Khrushchev, doesn't look like any picture of Khrushchev that I ever saw at any point in his life. Plus he's basically doing his "funny looking guy" schtick from Fargo, and yet it all works.

When Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police and probably responsible for untold terrors, gently tells Stalin's daughter that she needs to leave Russia because people who are strange like she is don't live very long, it is practically a sweet intimate moment that runs counter to everything we know about the guy.

This is a bleak yet hilarious comedy built around real events. I'd highly recommend it.

A dark comedic depiction of the terror inflicted by Stalin and those around him. As utterly bizarre and bad taste as that sounds, this is utterly fantastic. The cast as incredible as you'll see in any film, Buscemi and Beale especially, but really, everyone is flawless. The dialogue is hysterically delivered without even the hint of a Russian accent and the whole thing has an air of farce, but one surrounded with firing squads, power struggles and gulags. Only Simon Russel Beale as Beria really terrifies, with back stabbing, double crossing and a plot as twisted as the deceptions on screen, but really it's Jason Issacs that steals the show, his entrance and performance is nothing short of majestic! Hello!!

8/10