The Death of Stalin

A movie that tries to be funny about what is ultimately a very unfunny subject. The Soviet Union in the early '50s was indeed, as the film makes clear, a place of great upheaval, chaos and murder on a grand scale, so trying to laugh about it, and about the men who made much of that happen, is a tricky task. This “comedy of terrors” does eventually achieve a level of success on that undertaking, though it has to build in that effort to reach its ultimate crescendo of genuine amusement. The credit for that achievement largely rests with the performance of Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev. Buscemi, even with his follicles pared down to the former Soviet leader’s familiar hairline, does not particularly look like the man, yet he captures his brusque, blustery nature quite well while adding an extra layer of caustic manner to the characterization, a performance that leavens the proceedings with the lion’s share of the story’s humor. Good work is also handed in by Simon Russell Beale as Lavrenti Beria, who brings a fair share of jocularity to his character’s murderous doings. Still, there’s a reason it takes a while for the laughs to break out in this movie—the gruesome nature of life under the communist dictatorship was no laughing matter. (Oddly, it also probably does not help that so many of the characters are played here by British actors, and that famously dry British wit doesn’t work as well as usual in this context.) Overall, the story works and the film entertains, but it’s not quite the riot one might expect, all things considered. But, after all, it does beat a trip to the gulag.