Armando Iannucci does satire, but I can’t honestly say I have seen much of it. I liked his movie The Death of Stalin and saw a handful of episodes of his HBO series Veep. I tried his Avenue 5 but couldn’t get into it. Regardless, the man has a reputation, and one of his biggest successes was for British television, namely the political satire The Thick of It. I’ve never actually seen the show and only know it by its reputation.
However, it did get some sort of cinematic spin-off about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in the form of this movie, In the Loop.
When a cabinet minister, one Simon Foster MP (Tom Hollander), says something in a live interview about the war being “unforeseeable,” it sets off a firestorm of problems for Foster and a lot of other people in his orbit. The unseen Prime Minister, plus the equally unseen American President, seem to have other ideas, but the problem is Foster’s wishy-washy statements displease a whole lot of people, starting with the volcanic Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications. Foster’s statements get various American officials that would prefer peace to see him as a potential ally to stop the war, particularly since their own assessment says that while there are pros and cons to military action, there are far more cons than pros while the pros all come with caveats.
What follows is a series of blunders, childish behavior, and a lot of heavy swearing as people take the decision whether or not to go to war as a series of personal affronts. There are media leaks that lead to temper tantrums and threats to say nothing of the fact that various politicians and officials seem more inclined to want to do anything except their jobs. Some officials are bound and determined to get what they want and don’t much care for pesky things like “facts,” and the best evidence that there might be WMDs come from some unseen source named “Iceman”. It’s the sort of movie that should probably make you rather depressed if actual government officials behaved like this.
And that’s basically how Iannucci’s work often goes: people in positions of political power generally don’t deserve it. Foster, for example, has constituents back home that need his help for their various (seemingly minor) problems, and he’d just assume not deal with them at all. He’s also the sort of wienie that tries to leak rumors he’s going to resign in protest to see how people would react to such news only to be disappointed that barely anyone notices. Most of the British cast of the movie had appeared in The Thick of It, and at least two of the American cast–Anna Chlumsky and Zach Woods–would go on to play similar characters on Iannucci’s Veep. If anything, I think I might have enjoyed this movie more if I was familiar with the original show.
And that actually leads me to say something about Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker. I know Capaldi best for, among other things, his turn as the 12th incarnation of the title character for the long-running Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a family-friendly show, and Capaldi was an interesting take on the character. However, I was unprepared for just how good Capaldi was at swearing heavily and being generally threatening. He probably would have fit in fine with the cast of Succession. Often seen with a phone in one ear and shouting abuse at everyone around him, the one man Tucker couldn’t seem to intimidate was American General George Miller (James Gandolfini), and it wasn’t so much that Miller was better at meeting Tucker insult for insult so much as he was somewhat immune to the man’s abuse. I think if I had a reason to track down The Thick of It, Malcolm Tucker would be it.
Grade: B+
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