The Death of Stalin is a blacker-than-black comedy about the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how they jockey for power after the demise of Joseph Vissarionovich in 1953. The movie is sometimes gaspingly hilarious—and at all times audacious and original. It centers on a battle of wits and wills between Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and Lavrenti Beria (the British stage actor Simon Russell Beale).
Armando Iannucci, who cowrote and directed, is a Glaswegian of Italian descent best known for creating HBO’s Veep. As in Veep, he sugarcoats nothing. Every Soviet leader we see here is a petty, craven mass murderer or an accessory to same. Iannucci triumphs by turning them all into objects of sport and ridicule without ever letting us forget how evil they are. When Khrushchev and Beria join their fellow monsters in trying to lift Stalin’s inert mass off the floor of his office while desperately avoiding various forms of bodily discharge, we get uproarious slapstick that brings with it the startling sting of a real slap.
In one particularly inspired bit, the old ideologist Vyacheslav Molotov denounces the wife he thinks is dead for her counterrevolutionary activities and then, upon seeing her and even despite knowing she’s heard him, embraces her fondly and says he’s missed her. Molotov is played with surreally brilliant comic timing by Michael Palin, one of the original Monty Python performers. Palin’s presence reinforces the sense that The Death of Stalin is the best Python sketch never performed.
Indeed, I suspect Iannucci was inspired to take on this project in part if not wholly by the hilarious Python episode in which Palin plays the clueless outdoorsman Mr. Pither, a nerdy cyclist who rolls mistakenly into Communist Russia and finds himself in front of the most incompetent firing squad ever assembled. “After a few moments I perceived a line of gentlemen with rifles. They were looking in my direction,” Pither narrates. “I looked around but could not see the target.” (His greatest concern is that the Mars Bar in his backpack not be damaged.)
I can’t praise The Death of Stalin highly enough . . . except that it gets really boring after a while. The movie runs a little over an hour and 40 minutes, but there are no stakes here. The only way for any story to succeed is for it to take hold of you and make you care about the outcome. Since the movie posits that everyone we see is evil, by definition we’re not going to care about who succeeds and who fails. That’s morally sound on Iannucci’s part, but strictly as a storytelling matter, it’s self-defeating. After all, even in the midst of the lunatic silliness of the Python episode, you kind of felt sorry for Mr. Pither.
If you know what actually happened after the death of Stalin, the movie’s divergence from reality is a bit annoying. It compresses a complex series of events that took place over nine months into a week’s time, which was an effort on Iannucci’s part to keep things moving propulsively. But it just makes them seem hurried.
And if you don’t know what actually happened, the final outcome isn’t at all affecting or interesting because you’ve already gotten the idea they should all drop dead. (I know this because I used to know what happened but I forgot until it came back to me about 20 minutes before the end credits, which meant I was in both camps.)
One genuinely discomfiting aspect of The Death of Stalin has nothing to do with what is onscreen, and it likely happened without Iannucci’s involvement. In the movie, Jeffrey Tambor plays Malenkov, who nominally takes charge of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s passing. Tambor, of course, is the comic actor who found himself feted and lionized for playing the transgendered Maura on the celebrated Amazon show Transparent. He was fired after he was accused of sexually harassing two trans performers on the set (which he denies).
Before the accusations, the posters for The Death of Stalin featured Tambor cheek by jowl with Buscemi, Beale, and Palin. After the accusations, Tambor disappeared from the poster—replaced by a secondary player. In other words, the advertising for a movie about the evils of Stalinism adapted a purge-era technique and literally erased an inconvenient person from an existing image. There’s a degree of savage irony here that The Death of Stalin itself never even begins to approach.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
