SAD SATIRE
by
Douglas Messerli
Armando
Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin (based on the graphic novel by Fabien
Nury and Thierry Robin) (writers), Armando Iannucci (director) The Death of Stalin / 2018
Watching
British director Armando Iannucci’s The
Death of Stalin the other day, I asked the same questions as my husband,
Howard, what does this movie really intend to say? Yes, it is a satire, one can
imagine, but how can one possibly satirize the life of a man who killed
millions of his own citizens? And then turn the later violent figures around
him into a kind of “three stooges” satire of t
heir later takeover. True, Nikita
Khrushchev’s rise to power did lead to what many described as a
“thaw,”
or simply a more mild version of Stalin’s truly mad attacks on all of Russia’s
cultural institutions—including most of the nation’s artists, poets, musicians,
and, as the movie asserts, even Moscow’s physicians (they, so he claimed were
all plotting to kill him—sound familiar?), not to say anything about
journalists and simple truth-sayers, and anyone else who might have bothered to
question, or even not have openly questioned Stalin’s iron rule. Russian
citizens slept in their clothes so that, when they might be rounded up in
Stalin’s/Beria’s nightly purges, they would not be entirely naked. The lessons
of the Nazi round-ups of Jews had been well learned. At least, if they were
about to die, they would not go naked into their graves.
Yet, Iannucci’s film is, at least as many members of the audience with whom I attended this strange film attested, a comedy. At least they laughed, giggled, clapped their hands to thighs, etc. as if it was truly a “three stooges” comedy. I felt creepy, to the say the least. I know of the terrible fate of those who suffered under Stalin and even under his survivors, Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), and the even the more reform-minded Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), that I simply couldn’t laugh, as the younger audience members seemed able to do, about their clownish maneuvers as they struggled for new power.
Based on the French graphic novel by
Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, Iannucci’s film is a kind comic book recreation
of the significant event that was Stalin’s death, in this case, apparently,
caused, at least in part, by a vitriolic pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina (Olga
Kurylenko), who includes a note within the re-recorded concert that Stalin
demanded be delivered to him—despite the fact it was only a live performance.
All right, I appreciate the fact that
this film is a kind of post-modern re-do of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (a film that mocked Hitler), but then I never
much liked that movie nor the other film it calls up, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be again about Hitler—also
a work I have problems with. Comedy about mass killers, I guess, is just not my
thing. And laughter never once dominated Iannucci’s “comedy”; in fact, the
inordinate chuckles and thigh-slaps of several audience members almost made me
want to get up and leave the theater.
Call me prudish, or simply unable to
laugh at a good joke, but, despite an occasional chuckle, I just couldn’t cough
up a good laugh at the death of this desperate despot, anymore than I might
have sped along with any of what Trump describes as jokes. I like comedians,
just not murderous ones.
Was Iannucci and company simply trying to
tell us that we should just laugh away these monstrous beings? Or was it merely
trying to tell us, in a Kafka-like sense, to cough the deaths of thousands off
into the absurdity of history? Well, I’m all for that; but I just can’t do it.
I guess I have too much memory, and Stalin is still someone who I cannot laugh away.
I recall when I attended O What a Lovely War! with my elderly
friend Ruth Lagesen, the great interpreter of Grieg, in Oslo, I remember her
saying—and this still about World War I—“I just still cannot find it funny; I
lived through that war!”
I didn’t even live through the 1930 and
onward tyranny of Stalin, although he died in my 6th year of life,
but I don’t easily sniffle at his and his followers’ surely clumsy attempts to
gain control over a country still in the clumsy and very ugly control of Putin.
Surely, Iannucci realized the territory
is was attempting to breach. He has said as much in this morning’s Los Angeles Times.
Well, the cast is wonderful (they rehearsed
together for weeks before filming), and the images are quite marvelous, the
beauty of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, who we know in this country for her book
about her father’s tyranny (played by the beautiful Andrea Risborough), is stunning.
Despite my reactions about this film, there were many wonderful elements. I’d
simply say, this is not a comedy, but a kind of very dark vision, with comedic
elements, subsiding the terrible facts. And then I’d be somewhat uncomfortable
with its ruminations, despite the somewhat manic quality of its presentation.
Finally, in the last 2/3rds of the film,
I grew to somewhat like it. These were fools, after all, just not the stooge
figures that the movie first presented them as. They were all determined to
take over roles that could only present them as fools in history, just like the
terrible manic fool we have given over to our current government. He will not
survive, and he will be seen for what he was, just as Khrushchev’s ridiculous
determination to “bury us” will always be perceived as a ridiculous bluff.
What the director ultimately reveals is
that men fighting for power will all eventually bury themselves, fall into
their graves more quickly than even they might imagine, to be replaced by
equally rapacious figures. But some will simply fall away, be forgotten, even
ignored by their ignominious histories. Who remembers Beria or even Molotov
today? If we can’t forget Stalin, then perhaps we might soon forget the clown
Trump. I think that is truly what Iannucci is saying here, although I’m not yet
sure of what he thinks he is truly saying. And this movie, eventually seems to
be without purpose.
Well, let us imagine it as an absurd,
somewhat factual comedy of the end of the Russian empire, despite the fact that
it has already reimagined itself and is trying to recreate its terrible vision
across the world.
Los Angeles, March
12, 2018
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