Thoughts on The Death of Stalin (2017) · 7:22pm Oct 18th, 2023
Watched this with my sister and her husband on Sunday afternoon. I'd watched some scenes before, so I wasn't going into this totally blind, but my gosh, what a magnificently black bit of political satire. The tagline "A Comedy of Terrors" is well earned. 
It's 1953 and the Soviet Union lives in a constant state of fear. Joseph Stalin rules with an iron fist, his inner circle are all professional kiss-ups who live in constant fear of their own lives and willing to turn on each other on a dime... and that's not even getting into what it's like for the average citizen facing the risk of being hauled off and shot in the middle of the night in the latest purge.
And then, of course, Stalin suddenly dies, and a power vacuum has opened. The remaining members of the Presidium are off to the races in a mad bid to manipulate, backstab, and betray each other to figure out who wins the succession crisis...
Now, in description, none of what I've just described is funny. And indeed, you'd probably need a certain sense of humor to really appreciate the film. But it's all in the presentation, and the movie definitely delivers on that. There's a twisted humor that can be gleaned from some things (the sheer number of casual executions can definitely veer from "awful" to "funny in an awful way" very quickly), and then the decision to have the actors present their characters with various flavors of English accents adds another flavor of hilarity all its own.
You've never heard Joseph Stalin until you've heard him as a Cockney. Or Khruschev speaking in Steve Buscemi's New Jersey accent. Or, for that matter, Jason Isaacs' Georgy Zhukov as a Yorkshireman. (Zhukov is probably the best part of the movie, though that's not to discount any of the others in the ensemble. Buscemi is great as Khruschev, and so is Jeffrey Tambor as the flip-flopping Malenkov. Rupert Friend as Stalin's fuck-up son Vasily gets some comedic highlights too.) Though really, none of the cast hits a false note. There's a lot of good moments between the characters, as backstabbing and fucked up as the Presidium are, or as consistently, ruthlessly screwed-over as any of the other citizens of Soviet Russia are.
All told, solid movie, if you can stomach the tightrope walk between horror and pitch-black comedy. Glad I finally saw it in full.
Given the sheer paranoia and constant backstabbing and refusal to work together that permeated a lot of the upper escehelons of the Union, it's frankly miraculous it lasted as long as it did. I mean, the government's grip was as brittle as it was iron fisted, so it was never going to last, but, it's interesting that it took as long as it did to collapse.
5751249
You said it. That the USSR took until the very beginning of the 90s to officially come apart is... well, one may hesitate to call it a miracle, but it's certainly *something* special, all right.
5751321
Miracle is one word for it. Not sure if it's the word I'd use, but, it's certainly a descriptor.
Delivered to us by Armando Iannucci, the director behind the political satire TV comedy The Thick of It, which is basically multiple episodes of "a bunch of idiot politicians screw something up and then laughably struggle to cover their butts afterwards". Just do that but occasionally someone gets killed for it, and you've got The Death of Stalin.
5751687
Yeah, that's a very apt summation of things in a nutshell, I have to say.