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A Mix Of Farce And Terror In 'The Death Of Stalin'

IFC Films

Right off the bat, Scottish director Armando Ianucci’s The Death of Stalin scrambles the brain. The film opens at a concert in Moscow, and all the Russians on screen speak in either American or British accents. In most English language movies, characters who don’t speak English speak in the accents of their place. It’s silly, but we’re used to the evil Romans or Nazis sounding like upper class Britishers. The surprise here is a good one here, though, because the film is about dislocation and disorientation.

As the title says, the movie is about the death of the great Soviet ogre Josef Stalin. One March night in 1953, Stalin had a cerebral bleed and died a couple of days later. I was too young to know what it meant, but the headline in the local newspaper, “Stalin Is Dead” was about as long as my arm. Many people have written that it seemed as if whatever held the world together had broken.

To say the least, chaos followed. The film looks as if the camera itself has become unmoored. It wavers, pans, shifts angles and seems unsure of where to look. The movie takes place almost entirely indoors, so events feel insular, claustrophobic and maybe delusional. It all fits with the tumult among Stalin’s inner circle as they jockey for influence and power among themselves. Don’t take the movie as a literal depiction of actual events. Stalin’s enforcer, Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), for instance, wasn’t just taken out and shot in a barn – months later, he had a trial, of sorts and was shot with more formality than the film indicates. But The Death of Stalin certainly embodies the hypocrisy and malice of this gang.

Their language is consistently coarse and hostile; the re-framings of truth and the paranoid banter among the dead tyrant’s gang may remind some people of current political talk. Polina Molitova had been imprisoned and was believed executed. The No. 2 man in the Soviet Union, Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) spouts the obedient Stalinist line that she was a traitor, until old Polina herself is brought into the room, alive and kicking, and without a hitch Malenkov now adds that the evidence was flimsy.

The Soviet ice hockey team had all died in a plane crash, but because Soviet planes officially did not crash, nothing happened – which makes it hard to explain why none of the great hockey players are on the ice.

The tough part of The Death of Stalin is that it’s essentially comic. A comedy about murderers, with occasional scenes of them in action, grates against the funny bones. The Soviet World War II hero, Field Marshall Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) enters as a buffoon with a couple dozen medals stuck to his chest – but he’s less of a joke when he beats up Stalin’s useless son or puts a pistol to someone’s head.

Yet the witty, entertaining dialogue just bounces around. Even Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), who’s dead for most of the film, has snappy lines – although always with an edge that sends shudders through his ever-toadying pals. Nikita Khrushchev, known here as Nikki (Steve Buscemi) has a ton of sardonic laugh lines. But he plays a major role in the sudden fall and murder of the hated Beria.

It may help to know enough Russian history to recognize the players. The lineup includes short-term Soviet rulers, like Malenkov and Molotov, and the longtime diplomat Anastas Mikoyan who had something of a special relationship with John Kennedy, and who managed to survive Soviet power shifts from the revolution into the 1970s. Khrushchev, who later denounced Stalinism, won one power struggle, ruled for some years – including the Cuban Missile Crisis – until he was displaced by Leonid Brezhnev. But even if you don’t know all the characters, The Death of Stalin shows that there are dangerous and malicious buffoons in the world.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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