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.” (more…)
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