The Death Of Stalin

And Funerals

I knew I wasn’t going to get much Armando Iannucci in prison. The lauded writer-producer-director was responsible for one of the funniest movies of the 21st century, if not the funniest, “In The Loop”. But most of his material skews British, in location if not in sensibility. And England is a step too far for the dudes in prison, who have seven TV’s per 100 people but still only watch the same six-to-eight channels.

“The Death Of Stalin”, being not necessarily as Big and Brassy as, say, an Adam Sandler vehicle, would never pass muster in prison. And it’s a bit less funny than “In The Loop”, concentrating more on outsized personalities than narrative-based shenanigans. But otherwise, this is a pretty terrific movie, even if it skews towards the thoughtful and melancholic in the final stretch – that itself being a perverse joke on it’s own, albeit a dry one. 

This is a film about the public mourning when the world loses a political leader, both genuine and performative. And because of the latter, it’s also about the power vacuum that emerges during such scenarios. This is 1953, and Joseph Stalin is no more, but his influence remains. In passing he still carries influence, which means those taking advantage of his death are liable to endure repercussions. This is what happens when leaders who demand absolute fealty eventually fade away. The roaches scurry, and they’ll climb all over each other, even towards a certain death.

The peculiar novelty of this film lies in its casting. Not only did they employ a wonderful menagerie of diverse actors, they also allowed them to use their natural accents. Yes, Khruschev probably didn’t look or sound like Steve Buscemi. But he probably came across as Buscemi does here, a mixture of obsequious and Machiavellian. They are trying to capture the casual way these mass murderers and bureaucratic slimeballs actually act towards each other – which is to say, chummy, prank-ish, devil-may-care. As someone who has sat with unrepentant killers and sadistic masochists, I can tell you they are not that person all day and all night, even though they are that person all day and all night.

I wasn’t necessarily surprised to see Jason Isaacs, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Palin or Jeffrey Tambor in this. But I wasn’t expecting Rupert Friend to be having such a good time as Stalin’s sloppy, over-emotional son, considering I always saw him as an Orlando Bloom Xerox. There’s also Olga Kurylenko, former Bond Girl turned action star in a fairly serious, dignified role as a pianist — it’s an interesting role, in that she’s this movie’s lone voice of the Resistance. And there’s grody horror character actor legend Richard Brake! Put Brake in everything, make us all freak out all the time!

This is a movie about the halls of power, which allow passage for those who deserve it and sometimes those who don’t. As characters bicker and boast, hoping to keep the trains running on-time, alliances are formed and broken. The petty infighting is amusing, but the darkness sets in when you realize these men are making decisions based on ego, sometimes bruised, and they are decisions that will decide the fate of millions. It’s instructive with the movie’s acerbic tone to note that none of these people are concerned at all with how their actions are perceived, none of them consider who exactly is under their thumb. It’s a reminder how little has changed, and how little goes unchanged, as power goes unchallenged.

The bulk of this film surrounds the rituals of funerals. For all that time in prison, I knew people who died. But I only knew of one funeral. The man was in my unit, an older guy, with horrific charges. He was white and Southern, and wasn’t shy about using racially insensitive terms – this made me flinch, though others rolled with it to an extent. One day, he found out his wife passed on, a woman who was financially supporting him. Days later, he quietly keeled over in the yard and succumbed to a heart attack. He was pronounced dead in the hospital after they took him away. That might have been a legal gesture. Proclaiming him dead within the prison walls invites scrutiny, even though that seemed to be the case. Best for the institution to transfer the body, even if it is lifeless.

They had a service for him in the chapel. Sparsely attended. The in-house pastor (who once ended up sermonizing about how Donald Trump should lead a(nother?) coup to retake the Presidency) spoke, and a couple of us bowed our heads in the pews. I suppose there could have been less respectful ways of remembering him. For once, I could finally say someone had gone to a better place.