The Death of Stalin 2018
My nephew wanted to go see this movie and it is getting pretty good reviews. I heard it was kind of a comedy about the Soviet leadership when Stalin dies. Okay, I’ll try it. It is an odd movie, directed by the same guy behind Veep which I have tried and never liked. It is like Veep goes to Moscow in 1953, with a bunch of people angling for personal benefit, but trying not to look that way and also not look like idiots while looking over their shoulder in case someone wants to execute them. A lot of what happens in the movie happened in real life, which was all mostly a surprise to me because this wasn’t a part of history I was that familiar with (I took a year of Russian history in college and we didn’t get that far). So there is some venal bumbling, but also some violence, and then a lot of the scenes seem kind of roughly drawn and the actors improv their way through, which is something I don’t generally care for. Also the actors are all British and Americans using their own accents, so Kruschev, played by Steven Buscemi, has a New Jersey accent, while Molotov, played by Michael Palin, is British, and Stalin is almost cockney. Maybe they are trying to make the point that these are all working class guys. The costumes, settings, vehicles, and extras all look authentically Russian, so it is a pretty lavish production. In the end, I don’t think I liked it that much. It seemed like it couldn’t make up its mind whether to be a funny farce or stay true to the material so it doesn’t work well for comedy or drama: it is just kind of absurd. It definitely seems like it would be highly offensive to most Russians. But it did make me go back and read about all of the people portrayed and since I had faces to go with the names, maybe it makes more sense. So it did leave me thinking about it quite a bit, but overall I didn’t think it was that great.
Written: 26 Mar 2018