The Death of Stalin
Apr. 10th, 2018 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI saw The Death of Stalin in theaters and I loved it with the creepy love that only someone who has spent way too much time reading about the Soviet Union could feel. It is absolutely perfect except for the fact that it is merely a movie and not a six series long television show and therefore they had to leave out some of my favorite stupid horrible Soviet history things, because they had the misfortune not to fall around the time of Stalin’s death.
Like the time that Stalin’s son Yakov tried to shoot himself and the next time Stalin saw him he greeted him by saying, “Ha! You missed.”
Or the way that Sergo Orzhonikidze used to keep his best friend Leningrad party boss Kirov in Moscow longer by staging car crashes.
Or Khrushchev’s bizarre madcap tour of the United States in the late 1950s. That could surely furnish an entire miniseries all on its own. He befriended Eisenhower! And then he felt betrayed when an American spy plane got shot down over the Soviet Union, after Eisenhower personally promised to stop the flights, and this set off a series of temper tantrums that ended in Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN and announcing, “We will bury you!” to an audience of horrified Westerners who thought he meant this in a nuclear-war kind of way when actually he was referring to the Marxist theory of history and simply meant that capitalism would end up on the scrap heap of history after communism out-produced it.
However, although unfortunately The Death of Stalin is a mere two hours long, those two hours are an absolute gem. They play fast and loose with the chronology, packing into a single week a process that actual took months: Stalin’s death, Beria’s rise, and then Beria’s fall at the hands of the frantic Politburo.
But the movie gets the feeling of it right, the everpresent undercurrent of terror and the frantic attempts to cover it with a mask of gaiety. It manages to pack a ton of real history into its running time, like Stalin’s horrible all night dinners, where he forced his Politburo to get drunk and entertain him (Beria really did slip rotten tomatoes into Khrushchev’s pockets, just like he does in the movie), or Vasily Stalin’s general drunken failboat antics, like the time he accidentally got the national hockey team killed in a plane crash.
The casting is perfect all around, too. And I 100% approve of the decision to let the cast perform in their natural voices rather than put on Russian accents. Not only does it result in a more naturalistic style, but I think it subtly points up the fact that the Politburo members came from different parts of the USSR and did in fact have different accents. (Stalin’s Georgian accent was apparently difficult to understand on the radio.)
And it’s wickedly hilarious. It’s horrifyingly funny to watch the politburo members jockey for power, both before and after Stalin’s death, - and while it is hilarious, the film never lets you forget that there’s genuine horror underlying it all: these ludicrous sycophants are running a country, and doing a vicious nasty job of it too.
There’s a moment near the beginning of the film, where an orchestra conductor is woken in the middle of the night by someone pounding on his door - and kisses his wife goodbye as he tries to throw on as many warm clothes as possible, because he knows he’ll probably never see her again - only he’s not being arrested! They’ve just come to fetch him because they need an emergency conductor. Comrade Stalin wants a recording of a performance that unfortunately wasn’t recorded, and the original conductor fainted when he heard the news.
And so the newly awakened conductor, still in his bathrobe, conducts the symphony with a euphoric smile on his face, because this is so much better than what he expected when he heard the knock on the door.
It’s a funny scene - it can’t help but be funny - but it’s terrible too. There’s often something petty and small-minded about evil - and the consequences of that pettiness become devastating because they’re magnified by power - but the basic pettiness of the motivation remains. Stalin wants a recording and that spreads ripples of disruption through dozens of lives.
I liked it so much that I’m actually thinking about seeing it in theaters again. The last time I did that was for Fellowship of the Ring.
Like the time that Stalin’s son Yakov tried to shoot himself and the next time Stalin saw him he greeted him by saying, “Ha! You missed.”
Or the way that Sergo Orzhonikidze used to keep his best friend Leningrad party boss Kirov in Moscow longer by staging car crashes.
Or Khrushchev’s bizarre madcap tour of the United States in the late 1950s. That could surely furnish an entire miniseries all on its own. He befriended Eisenhower! And then he felt betrayed when an American spy plane got shot down over the Soviet Union, after Eisenhower personally promised to stop the flights, and this set off a series of temper tantrums that ended in Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN and announcing, “We will bury you!” to an audience of horrified Westerners who thought he meant this in a nuclear-war kind of way when actually he was referring to the Marxist theory of history and simply meant that capitalism would end up on the scrap heap of history after communism out-produced it.
However, although unfortunately The Death of Stalin is a mere two hours long, those two hours are an absolute gem. They play fast and loose with the chronology, packing into a single week a process that actual took months: Stalin’s death, Beria’s rise, and then Beria’s fall at the hands of the frantic Politburo.
But the movie gets the feeling of it right, the everpresent undercurrent of terror and the frantic attempts to cover it with a mask of gaiety. It manages to pack a ton of real history into its running time, like Stalin’s horrible all night dinners, where he forced his Politburo to get drunk and entertain him (Beria really did slip rotten tomatoes into Khrushchev’s pockets, just like he does in the movie), or Vasily Stalin’s general drunken failboat antics, like the time he accidentally got the national hockey team killed in a plane crash.
The casting is perfect all around, too. And I 100% approve of the decision to let the cast perform in their natural voices rather than put on Russian accents. Not only does it result in a more naturalistic style, but I think it subtly points up the fact that the Politburo members came from different parts of the USSR and did in fact have different accents. (Stalin’s Georgian accent was apparently difficult to understand on the radio.)
And it’s wickedly hilarious. It’s horrifyingly funny to watch the politburo members jockey for power, both before and after Stalin’s death, - and while it is hilarious, the film never lets you forget that there’s genuine horror underlying it all: these ludicrous sycophants are running a country, and doing a vicious nasty job of it too.
There’s a moment near the beginning of the film, where an orchestra conductor is woken in the middle of the night by someone pounding on his door - and kisses his wife goodbye as he tries to throw on as many warm clothes as possible, because he knows he’ll probably never see her again - only he’s not being arrested! They’ve just come to fetch him because they need an emergency conductor. Comrade Stalin wants a recording of a performance that unfortunately wasn’t recorded, and the original conductor fainted when he heard the news.
And so the newly awakened conductor, still in his bathrobe, conducts the symphony with a euphoric smile on his face, because this is so much better than what he expected when he heard the knock on the door.
It’s a funny scene - it can’t help but be funny - but it’s terrible too. There’s often something petty and small-minded about evil - and the consequences of that pettiness become devastating because they’re magnified by power - but the basic pettiness of the motivation remains. Stalin wants a recording and that spreads ripples of disruption through dozens of lives.
I liked it so much that I’m actually thinking about seeing it in theaters again. The last time I did that was for Fellowship of the Ring.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-16 05:00 pm (UTC)Poor Vasily and Svetlana. :( It can't be easy when your dad is Stalin and all your dad's friends are Stalin's creepy death squad.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-16 11:29 pm (UTC)The pants thing is 100% based on reality, by the way. IIRC in real life they actually cut the seat out of his trousers (the 'trial' took longer than in the movie so they had more time to prepare), but undoing his belt so his pants fall down is a rough-and-ready substitute.
Poor Svetlana and Vasily for real. They never signed up for any of this!
no subject
Date: 2018-04-18 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-19 02:21 am (UTC)It's not graphic - you don't see blood or burnt skin or anything - just this guy flailing around in pure panic. And the moment just punctures the "Fuck yeah, rebellion!" thing.
The underlying dynamics are quite different, but it connected to The Death of Stalin in my mind while I was watching, because you've got this same dynamic where the movie builds up toward something - and then undercuts itself - and leaves you with this haunting image. There turns out to be nothing redemptive in the violence.
For The Death of Stalin it's really made me want to see Iannucci's other work, because as you say there is that hard moral heart to it, and I feel like that's something lacking in a lot of political satire - a lot of politically themed works in general. There's a bedrock sense of what is actually valuable, which shines through the movie even though none of the Politburo guys have a damn clue, and I think without that art about politics ultimately becomes hollow.