British satire nets bits of black humor in this ambitious depiction of the 1953 demise of Communist Josef Stalin, who murdered millions of people in Soviet Russia and enslaved the whole country. This fact and the scale of Stalin’s horror dooms The Death of Stalin though co-writer and director Armando Ianucci, who created HBO’s Veep, does what he can. The “comedy of terrors” is based on two French comics, including La Mort de Staline.
Quickly setting the scene in Moscow with dictator Stalin surrounded by his top, which is to say most incompetent, immoral and brutal, Communist comrades, The Death of Stalin launches with profanity-laced jokes about everything under the Soviet regime.
Most in the audience sat stone-faced and, for most of the movie, so did I, though scattered howls and shrieks erupted. Ianucci, feeding off the cast’s desperate, rapid-fire vulgarities as characters driven by the terror, parasitism and power-lust bred by a government predicated on altruism, keeps truth close.
If you know the history of Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) and Molotov (Michael Palin), you might watch with an odd, knowing curiosity to see how this aligns with history. As far as I know, and for what it’s worth, it does, sparing no detail.
If you don’t know history, you might chuckle (or you might not), though most will have a hard time laughing. The Death of Stalin is too truthful to be humorous. This, unfortunately, makes it painful to watch.
Ianucci does not glorify or glamorize Communism, to his credit. Unlike the flat and vapid interviewer in an ArcLight Hollywood Q&A after the film, he takes Josef Stalin’s atrocities seriously. Despite its flaws, which may be fundamental, including modern dialogue, this seriousness supports what may be Ianucci’s attempt to render moral judgment to the climax of history’s most consistent practice of Communism.
When Stalin’s daughter (Andrea Riseborough) pleads with Soviet security chief Beria to pardon “just one person” she loves from exile, persecution and death, or when one top terrorized thug tells another to “trust no one”, or when you realize that 1,500 people were slaughtered in an afternoon for trying to attend Stalin’s state funeral, or when the faces of individuals are literally blanked out as end credits run, The Death of Stalin, perhaps predictably, blunts any satire of Stalin’s evil. As an aside, these end credits are precisely and cleverly how end credits can have impact on an audience in a self-contained movie; Black Panther and Marvel fans (proudly, I am neither), take note.
I also proudly admit that, as a rule, I do not find humor in totalitarianism. I don’t think The Producers, Hogan’s Heroes, Life is Beautiful or even the presumably light and often lovely Ninotchka, which stars the brilliant Greta Garbo, truly depict good humor. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny is a better example and it may be the only civilized comedy about a monstrous and bloody dictatorship, though I’d rather watch the foreign adaptation of Ayn Rand’s We the Living (1942) for a deadpan delivery of dry humor with the truth about dictatorship.
If you want to fully understand this contrast, see The Death of Stalin and watch the character Maria (Olga Kurylenko), who, motivated by self-sacrifice and powered by faith, stands up to the state. Then, watch We the Living‘s character Kira (Alida Valli), who, motivated by egoism and powered by reason, stands up to the state. The difference hints at what may be The Death of Stalin‘s poison pill — its lone voice of dissent to the slave state shares the Soviet Union’s basic ideals, making what The Death of Stalin fundamentally accepts as true impossible to satirize.