The Death of Stalin (2017)

THE DEATH OF STALIN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Armando Iannucci
    Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor,
    Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Adrian McLoughlin,
    Paddy Considine, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi
A dark, crazy, fascist farce about what happens in the upper echelons of the Kremlin when Josef Stalin has a massive stroke and all the minions who have climbed through the ranks (and stayed alive) by toadying up to the old man start maneuvering to see who will succeed him. Anybody who was tracking the news during the 1950s will recognize the names: Molotov, Bulganin, Mikoyan and others. Stalin's immediate replacement, Georgy Malenkov, is a ditherer, and the battle for the top job becomes a duel between the much-feared security chief Lavrenti Beria and the jocular Moscow Party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Beria (Simon Russell Beale) has the edge starting out. He's cagey, ruthless, ambitious, and as Stalin's enforcer, he knows where the bodies are buried. He should. He buried them. Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) comes off as a sort of buffoon, which masks a fine-tuned sense of the ever-shifting game and a shrewd, calculating instinct for survival. An exchange at the end between Khrushchev and Stalin's daughter Svetlana is pivotal. Throughout the film Khrushchev has deferred to Svetlana, accommodating her whims and wishes any way he can. Now, after engineering the execution of his main rival, he tells her the way things are going to be, and you realize that a shift has occurred, and so does she. The Politburo's class clown has effectively seized control. It's all played for laughs, but the reality behind the comedy wasn't all that funny. Beria, especially, was a monster, and real Russians were tortured, gunned down and shipped off to the gulag, not just under Stalin, but later, too. Sometimes you just have to laugh, I guess. But you feel a little uneasy, just the same.