Political satire is tricky to create and impossible to satisfy everyone who witnesses it.  For every viewer that sees brilliance and cleverness someone else sees insult and stupidity, and that’s just due to its political content.  Factor in style, pace, casting, the script and production values and there is no way that any randomly-chosen five people could possibly agree about it.  The Death of Stalin is a prime example: some critics are fawning all over it, proclaiming it the best film of the year so far.  I yawn at that claim.  It was okay, somewhat clever, at best.

Armando Iannucci’s film turns the 1953 death of Russia’s dictator, Josef Stalin, into a chessboard stratagem, with various Russian political leaders and their sycophants all jockeying for position behind the three men who are making claim to power: Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor).  Only one can become the next General Secretary and whoever it will be is likely to purge the ranks of anyone who opposes him.  So the stakes are high and the bloodbath is coming fast.

One might think that this is hardly the subject for big laughs — and one would be right.  Satire isn’t about laughs; it’s about finding sly, painful truth in absurdity, and even I must admit that some of Iannucci’s targeting is true.  Anything can be made funny, and some of this is, but not nearly enough.  Good satire also requires evocative, even exquisite, language to succeed; Iannucci is not Shakespeare, or even Anthony Shaffer (who wrote Sleuth).  Iannucci defaults to four- and twelve-letter words all too often and stresses the obvious perhaps more than necessary.  Finally, finding anything funny about Beria, one of the twentieth century’s most terrifying human monsters, is an awfully difficult challenge, one unlikely to succeed.

I didn’t care for Iannucci’s previous political satire, In the Loop (2009), and I didn’t care for this either.  Things he thinks are funny are just not to me.  This film tries very hard to keep its characters hopping, to mine the humor in political posturing and backsliding, to change directions at the drop of a hat and to treat an incredible moment in world history as a parlor game.  Sometimes it succeeds, and it certainly presents the situation as jaw-dropping spectacle.  It’s an interesting curio, but I didn’t find it particularly edifying to watch.  ☆ ☆.  12 April 2018.