It took this clip on Reddit to prod me to go watch The Death of Stalin today. It only needed eleven seconds to convey the mood of the movie rather better than the awful official trailer above, which simultaneously tries to make it all more serious than it should be and leans too hard into nudging you in the side for the humourous bits. But this is Armando Iannucci bringing the same energy of the thick of It and In the Loop; eleven seconds of Zhukov dramatically taking of his coat works so much better.
Zhukov, with Khrushchev and rather nauseatingly, Beria, is the hero of the movie after all and gets that heroic entrance. They’re the ones who act, who get things done while the rest of the cast bumble around. These are all as venal and crooked and steeped in blood as the rest of them, but Iannucci still likes them the way he liked Malcolm Tucker. They’re fun, they get to do things and they get to curse.
This is just a romp of course, a mockery. Russia was right to ban it. It tramples right on the neo-Soviet myth making of Putin and his cretins, while it makes that whole gulag business look a jolly jape too. The victims are nameless, shot of screen; the executioners get to tell jokes. The villains at the heart of it all are humanised, the same way the asshole politicians of Iannucci’s early works were. And because it is a romp, don’t take its historical inaccuracies so seriously.
Is there anything more to it than just a spectacle piece for a group of good actors to get their teeth in? Not really.
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