satire

In The Loop (Director: Armando Iannucci): On this side of the pond, the name Armando Iannucci likely doesn’t ring a bell, but for fans of British comedy, the man is con­sidered a genius. His col­lab­or­a­tions with Steve Coogan include the classic Alan Partridge shows (The Day Today, Knowing Me, Knowing You, I’m Alan Partridge). Most recently, he’s been writing and dir­ecting a blaz­ingly fast and funny series called The Thick of It, which mines the comedic ter­ritory of polit­ical media hand­lers working for the British government.

In The Loop takes almost all the actors from that show, mixes up the char­ac­ters a bit, and places them in the midst of the run up to the (unnamed but blind­ingly obvious) Iraq war in 2003. Peter Capaldi returns as Malcolm Tucker, the whipsmart press sec­retary with a mean streak. I’ve never heard more cre­ative swearing in my life, and if you’re offended by “f-bombs” then this film is def­in­itely not for you. But it’s my firm belief that no one can curse more cre­at­ively than our friends from the British Isles, and every char­acter reaches for the stars in this very funny movie.

Simon Foster is the min­ister for inter­na­tional devel­op­ment who puts his foot in his mouth by making off-the-cuff remarks about the pos­sib­ility of a war. The press runs riot and Malcolm Tucker tears young Foster a new back­side. The rest of the film fol­lows the boun­cing min­ister as he’s used by pro– and anti-war fac­tions in both the UK and the US. He con­tinues to fudge his “lines” and the res­ulting mess makes for some very funny situ­ations. While The Thick of It con­fines itself to English politics, In The Loop cre­ates sim­ilar char­ac­ters on the American side, with James Gandolfini clearly enjoying him­self as a peace-loving gen­eral who nev­er­the­less threatens to kill sev­eral of his polit­ical oppon­ents. It’s nice, too, to see Anna Chlumsky (best known for 1991’s My Girl) return in the role of a young aide to an anti-war assistant sec­retary of state.

Overall, though, the Brits get the best lines (as might be expected) and one of the fun­niest scenes is when Malcolm Tucker the angry Scot actu­ally brings in an even angrier Scot to handle yet another press leak. Steve Coogan has a small cameo as an irate local man trying to get his mother’s garden wall fixed in the midst of an inter­na­tional crisis. Though I would have loved to see more of him, giving him a bigger role might have unbal­anced the mostly star-free cast. In The Loop will be riot­ously funny to anyone with even a passing interest in the work­ings of politics. Though it’s not any­thing spe­cial cine­mat­ic­ally (think a longer episode of The West Wing), there’s enough crack­ling dia­logue to keep you laughing all the way through. In fact, it’s a per­fect film for DVD since you may find your­self having to rewatch cer­tain scenes, either because the accents are slightly unin­tel­li­gible, or because you were laughing so hard you missed the next piece of dialogue.

This was a film whose trailer let it down because it had to cut out all the swearing. So I’ve included instead an actual clip. Be fore­warned, though, that this con­tains some many naughty words.

(8/10)

Tagged as: politics, satire, uk, war

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