Butler's Cinema Scene

Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, Jason Isaacs as Zhukov

“THE DEATH OF STALIN” My rating: B+

 107 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Cold War-bred baby boomers may be perplexed to discover that Nikita Khrushchev  — the Soviet bigwig who infamously pounded his shoe on a desk at the United Nations and proclaimed that “We will bury you” — is the hero of “The Death of Stalin.”

Just goes to show: History makes for strange bedfellows.

Make no mistake: Khrushchev, played here by a balding, pudgied-up Steve Buscemi, is presented as a hustling, scheming political climber.  But compared to the forces he’s battling, he’s one of the angels.

Unfolding over several days in 1953, “The Death of Stalin” is history retold as a black comedy.  It was written and directed by Armando Iannucci, the Scottish filmmaker who in 2009 gave us the brilliant sendup of Bush-era idiocy, “In the Loop.”

If anything, “…Stalin” surpasses that effort with its toxic/weirdly entertaining mix of terror, paranoia and manic broken-glass satire.

Iannucci and his co-writers (David Schneider, Ian Martin, Peter Fellows) waste no time in laying out the miseries of Stalin-era USSR.  In a brilliantly edited opening sequence, we hopscotch around Moscow on a chilly March  night.

At Radio Moscow an official (Paddy Considine) freaks out when he gets a phone call from Stalin asking for a recording of that night’s live Mozart concerto. Problem is, the program wasn’t recorded.  The doors are barred, the nervous audience members told to return to their seats (“Don’t worry, nobody’s going to get killed”) and a guest conductor is snatched from his apartment in his pajamas to replace the original maestro, who has knocked himself unconscious by taking a header into a fire extinguisher.

The Radio Moscow man knows that people have been shot for less than failing to produce a recording for the glorious leader.

Meanwhile in the Kremlin, Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) is busy hobnobbing with his security chief Beria (Simon Russell Beale), whittling down a list of “enemies” to be arrested and disposed of that very night.

“Cracks me up, this one,” Stalin chortles, pointing to one of the names.

Nearby, Communist Party leaders like Khrushchev, Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and Molotov (Michael Palin) trade vodka shots are behaving like boorish frat boys, recycling war stories and trying not to piss off Stalin. (After each meeting with the head honcho, Khrushchev goes over every comment so as to avoid in the future any topics that Stalin finds distasteful.)

The next day Stalin is found lying on the floor, barely alive, the victim of a stroke.

His cohorts are paralyzed by indecision. They can’t even agree on whether to call in medical assistance: “All the best doctors are in the gulag…or dead.”

Simon Russell Beale as Beria

Within hours Stalin is gone and a full-fledged power struggle is playing out as a sort of slamming-door, trigger-pulling farce.

On the one side is Beria, whose bland country banker looks belie a fierce lust for power.  As the man who has abetted Stalin in imprisoning and killing untold hundreds of thousands, he knows where the bodies are buried…and is more than willing to bury thousands more.

Opposing him is Khrushchev, who thinks it’s time to finally end the long reign of terror.

And in the middle is Malenkov, a buffoonish dolt who is, by virtue of his position, now the ostensible leader of the party and the nation.  Mostly he’s concerned with looking good in state portraits.

Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov

As the funeral preparations get underway, these guys at the top must contend not only with their own battling egoes and ideologies but with the demands of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough), who hasn’t quite figured out that she’s now persona non grata. Then there’s her drunken brother Vasily (Rupert Friend), whose behavior seems like an invitation to a bullet.

Entering at the last minute is Field Marshal Zhukov (Jason Isaacs), a bombastic war hero with little tolerance for Beria and his gang of security thugs.

All of this unfolds with the crazed surrealism of a Marx Brothers comedy.  Except that virtually all of the characters and situations were drawn from history.

Iannuci’s film looks absolutely authentic, from the intimate setting of Stalin’s bedroom to the moments of Zhivago-esque spectacle, and the breathless pacing and matter-of-fact spurts of violence will keep the attention even of those who know nothing about the Stalin era.

Ultimately “The Death of Stalin” is about the familiar theme of the banality of evil.  Rarely, though, has that banality been so entertaining.

| Robert W. Butler