Armando Iannucci makes Stalin’s succession crisis funny without making its participants seem harmless. Simon Russell Beale is particularly unsettling, though the broader clowning occasionally makes the danger harder to believe.
The Death of Stalin finds its comedy in men trying to protect themselves while pretending to serve the state. Armando Iannucci makes their vanity funny and their scramble for power frightening, often within the same exchange. This is a sharp, sour political farce with an excellent ensemble, and we recommend it with a reservation about the broader clowning. The noisy foolishness sometimes makes the threat recede. A supporting performance is occasionally allowed to become one long comic turn.
The death of Josef Stalin, played by Adrian McLoughlin, leaves Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrenti Beria competing for advantage, with Georgy Malenkov struggling to look capable of leadership. The screenplay, credited to Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin, David Schneider and Fabien Nury, makes that competition legible through insults, evasions and frantic changes of position. The exchanges are funny because the men cannot speak freely even to their supposed colleagues. Each must judge how much certainty he can afford before somebody else decides that certainty is disloyalty.
Steve Buscemi gives Khrushchev an impatience that makes his calculations easy to follow, without turning him into somebody to cheer for. Simon Russell Beale’s Beria is harder to read and much more disturbing. His composure makes the other men’s fuss seem especially foolish, as if he has grasped the business of power before they have finished arguing about it. The scenes between them work because both actors keep the desire to win close to the surface. Neither needs to underline the joke.
Jeffrey Tambor makes Malenkov’s vanity almost endearing, which is an uncomfortable achievement. We laughed at his efforts to look capable, then felt uneasy about how harmless he had begun to seem. Jason Isaacs gives Field Marshal Zhukov a swagger that supplies a welcome change of pace. Rupert Friend, as Vasily Stalin, has less room to vary his bluster. Here the broadness flattens the character, and after a while another outburst adds little.
Zac Nicholson’s cinematography keeps the group scenes readable, so a rival’s reaction can matter as much as the person speaking. Cristina Casali’s production design makes the Kremlin’s authority credible, even while the actors are busy making its occupants look ridiculous. Peter Lambert’s editing is alert to the pace of the exchanges, letting a line register before the next speaker tries to gain control. Together, those choices make the enclosed scenes lively, but they cannot entirely disguise how often another argument does the work of moving the story forward.
Christopher Willis’s music gives the danger weight, which helps prevent the comedy from becoming too comfortable. It suits a film that keeps the suffering caused by these men in view. The unpleasantness matters: if the officials were merely incompetent, their arguments would soon become tiresome. Their capacity for cruelty gives even the pettiest disagreement a reason to hold our attention.
Political farce often promises the pleasure of seeing someone exposed as a fool. Here, recognising the fools offers little reassurance, since they still have power over other people. At 107 minutes, the film gives the quarrelling enough time to become oppressive without exhausting the joke. Watch it for the cast, and avoid it if cruelty spoils a comedy for you.
