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Originally Posted by keirarts  The death of Stalin |
I saw this last Thursday and completely agree with your assessment. It works as a funny satire because the stakes were so high. In The Thick of It and Veep, the comedy often comes from situations in which someone might screw up and be yelled at by their boss or ridiculed in the media (or both). In the case of the Central Committee struggling to come to terms with the idea that 'Comrade' Stalin might be dead and what to do next, it's not a question of being chewed out by Malcom Tucker, but being executed and your family sent to a Siberian gulag.
This is where the uncomfortable comedy involving the titular event comes from because no one seems to want to say with any certainty "Stalin is dead" because if they are wrong, then they will be executed; being terrified of a corpse is both hilarious and horrific.
The all-star cast are superb and I've heard great things about Simon Russell Beale's stage work and he is possibly the star of the show here as the grotesque Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police. There are other great performances from Michael Palin, Steve Buscemi and Jason Isaacs, all of whom are funny and terrifying.
There was no point when I felt this downplayed the worst excesses of Stalin's murderous regime, indeed is most effective when the comedy drops out altogether and you have a room of an apologetic and sociopathic killers, each of whom is deadly afraid of the others.
It is a real shame it has not had a wider cinematic distribution as it's something I would really like to see again, and may do next week.