The Death of Stalin - A can a comedy with this much death still be funny?

Armando Iannucci is the satirical prophet of the post modern age.  Ever since he co-penned The Day Today in the 1990s his work has been at the cutting edge of political satire in the UK.  His work has always flourished by taking what is really happening and pushing it just beyond the edges of something we might expect.

Iannucci's real gift has always been creating characters that remind us how everyone is fallible.  In the same way that the Coen Brothers did with The Big Lebowski (got the Coens in the mind at present), there is great joy to be had in presenting big stars, big cheeses and big wigs as laughable, vainglorious people who are no more masters of the universe than the common man.  See Alan Partridge.  See every character in The Thick of It who wasn't Malcolm Tucker.  It makes sense to apply this logic to any era of celebrity or politics - after all there's nothing new under the sun and nothing especially dim about the political try-hards of our era in comparison to other times.  As such I presume the idea behind this film was born - what if the members of the all-powerful Soviet Central Committee at the time of the death of Joseph Stalin were in fact all rather idiotic careerists?  Could that be funny too?

Well it turns out the answer is yes and no.  There are universal themes when satirising politics, but for specifics to work the audience needs to be familiar with the players and the important issues of the times.  The Death of Stalin is a film that does well to introduce the central characters and tries hard to put us into an era of mass intellectual pogroms and disappeared people, but it starts to falter when one realises that this stuff really did happen and isn't actually that funny.  When we satirise the uselessness of the UK government it can be funny as they really are useless.  They're not busy executing random proportions of London's population at the same time as being useless.  If they were then I think Iannucci would be making a very different film (or more likely he wouldn't be making films at all).

As a result the film adopts a very distracting tone, one which shifts between extra-judicial executions and hi-jinx over which potential successor to Stalin gets to greet his daughter first.  The opening sequence provides a blueprint for the tone they should have adopted throughout.  Here we see a concert being recreated so that it can be recorded and delivered to a barely-interested Stalin.  Everyone is terrified of displeasing the leader - who turns out to be rather deadbeat and not the least bit interested on exacting vengeance upon anyone when the recording is delivered late.  It works as a satire of the Soviet cult around Stalin, of Stalin's perceived status, it's funny, and crucially no one gets shot in the face - which usually isn't funny.

The film could even have kept its rather brutal ending if it had adopted this approach - the final bloody move by one faction in the central committee against the other would be effective and jarring if it was the first time we had seen any real violence.  The reality of the era could have been highlighted after the audience had been disarmed by the comic idiocies inherent in it.  But by littering violence throughout the audience is protected from any shock, as well as being unable to get immersed in the satire.

Having said all this, Iannucci has a really good go at making a film I would suspect no one else would even attempt (probably for the reasons outlined here).  The casting of Jason Issacs as Marshal Zhukov is a particular highlight, showing a revered 'hero' of the Soviet Union as a Tucker-esque foul-mouthed brute interested only in punching his opponents in the face.  Iannucci completionists and those interested in Soviet history have no reason to avoid this film, but I suspect most people will be left rather cold.