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| First off, who's that under all the nose-putty? |
Next scene is somewhere else, with a guy who looks kinda like Stalin, also speaking English with a British accent. His right hand man returns banter with his own British accent. So okay, the Russians are speaking the King’s English in this movie. Kinda rare these days — even Tarantino resorts to subtitles — but I think I get it. Then Steve Buscemi shows up, sans British accent. Wait: he’s Kruschev??
This experience was akin to the first bike ride in spring. The derailleur is off, so no matter which gear you try the chain is slipping and you’re not making progress. One proper adjustment later, you’re flying.
For the next 90 minutes of TDOS I was flying. When the end-credits rolled I logged into FB, updated my status with:
“Seemed like a good weekend to watch The Death Of Stalin. Soviet enthusiasm for discharging weapons upon their own felt a touch exaggerated, but probably erred on the side of understatement. And Steve Buscemi’s Brooklyn accent actually kinda worked to set Kruschev apart, in character, from the other manipulators in the room.”I hit post, then hit the sack.
In the morning the only response to my post was Joel’s, with a link to this video:
If you can’t be bothered to watch, the gist of the complaint is summed up by The Cynical Historian (“Cypher”) in his video description, to wit:
“Some of the license taken is necessary, but there are some dangerous falsehoods and misconceptions this movie proliferates. They needed to take greater care with such a touchy subject.”And Kruschev never spoke English with a Brooklyn nasality. But, sure, alright. Since I was the doofus who raised the spectre of historicity to begin with, the correction was more than fair game.
However, Cypher’s finger-wagging — “They needed to take greater care with such a touchy subject” — is, to my mind, easily deflected. I could be wrong here too, of course. Maybe the world would be a better place if Shakespeare had “taken greater care” with Richard III.
Not that I equate The Death Of Stalin with Shakespeare. TDOS views more like a hybrid of Duck Soup and Natural Born Killers, concluding with heady finishing notes of Pineapple Express. That may or may not be to the tastes of contemporary Russian cinema audiences, depending. But it plays well to a certain subset of the American cinema audience.
Ironically enough, the Americans digging TDOS are the Americans most likely to earnestly take on board Cypher’s criticisms. They’re the same Americans who made a point of checking out Anthony Lane’s thoughts on the movie.
i.e., They’re the same Americans glued to the news this weekend, even though utterly assured that impeachment will be a wash.
To view TDOS as any sort of commentary on Stalin and Russia is to commit to a double misreading.
Writer/Director Armando Ianucci is the big kahuna responsible for rolling out the HBO political satire Veep. He left at the close of season five, when its satire couldn’t keep up with the headlines. Disembarking at the Land of the Rose he came home to a political scene every bit as bonkers as the one he’d left behind.
Satirists can no longer satirise the contemporary political scene using contemporary political touchpoints — there is no way to render them any more grotesque than they already are. So Ianucci reached for the most grotesque political moment in living memory, and recomposed it set to recognisably contemporary Western cringe-comedy beats.
We aren’t watching a satire of Russian history — we are watching a satire of the Western Populist Present, the goons and clods who “lead” it, and the rubes and plebes who throw themselves into its collective pyre, wittingly or not.
That addresses misreading number one. The second misreading is of the American movie audience, the bulk of which cannot be bothered with this movie. Within this enormous group is another subset posting “red pill” take-downs of Star Wars and MCU movies. This is the “Pinochet did nothing wrong” bunch, and they also can’t be bothered to parse “Great Man Of History” vs. “Change from the top or bottom?” issues of historical interpretation — for them the matter settles squarely in the “Great Man” camp.
This bunch thinks “Putin’s a great guy.”
I’m not knocking Cypher’s exhortation toward deeper reading and pondering — “The answer lies in further study” is a personal motto. But at this point in history, those who place any value whatsoever in the tradition of American Liberalism dearly need to get their eye back on the ball and keep it there. And getting touchy about The Death Of Stalin is a distraction.
*Honestly, it is time for Hogtown to relinquish “Centre Of The Universe” status to Hamilton. Cos Toronto — man, we haven’t had that Spirit here since 1979.
2 comments:
First of all, thanks for the shout-out.
Secondly, all the previews I've seen for Death of Stalin make it look really hilarious. If I ever manage to track down a copy of it in this part of the world, I would be totally up for viewing it. I've been wanting to see it for a while, and your review makes me even more interested.
Well, "funny" is in the eye of the beholder of course. My friend Darko thought it was a "meh" chiefly because it did not deliver on the laughs for him -- and he's Croatian, so he likes his humour dark and bitter, which this definitely is. And the cringe-comedy element, which I would say is the predominant strain, is an odd twist on the scene. I liked it, as you can probably tell. Once you've seen it we can talk particulars.
For me the pleasure was in the nihilism -- it was a dark thrill watching these characters prove themselves utterly without moral compass. There's a scene about 2/3rds of the way through when Beriya pontificates, tersely, that gave me goose-bumps the way a good rendering of "Now is the winter of our discontent" can.
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