The Death of Stalin (2017)

"I’m sorry you heard that, but he is a camel cock.”

This is my first opportunity in this blog to praise the great Armando Iannucci. I have, of course, seen all of The Thick of It, Alan Partridge and The Day Today, as well as some more obscure and older stuff. I am, it’s fair to say, quite the fanboy. And this film is in Iannucci‘s usual improvisational style and is rather good. So don’t expect a hatchet job.

It’s all historically accurate barring the odd bit of artistic licence- in reality Beria was executed a full six months after his downfall- and the inspired decision to ban cod Russian accents helps the film enormously. The cast is superb, with Steve Buscemi perfect as Khrushchev and Simon Russell Beale utterly evil as the loathsome Lavrentiy Beria. But it’s Michael Palin’s Molotov who steals the show, in a perfect bit of casting, as the fogeyish but utterly fanatical Vyacheslav Molotov, whose loyalty extends to believing his arrrsted wife must indeed be a traitor.

We begin with clear demonstrations of the evil of the regime, with one of Stalin’s “lists” being enacted as another load of random people are “disappeared” into Beria’s torture chambers, where he enjoys himself far too much for comfort. He’s an utterly repulsive and dangerous human being, yet it’s creepy that his downfall is in the end because of trumped up treason charges, with his very real history of extreme murder, torture and paedophilia a mere afterthought.

What disturbs, yet rings very true, is the sheer laddishness of the committee as a whole. They all plot for power, yes. They’ve all done terrible things for the party. But they’re nevertheless (the humourless Malenkov excepted) a bunch of immature “lads”. And yet there’s a fanatical groupthink here that is a scary ondictment of unchecked power with many lessons for us today. A superb film.