In the Loop
Dir: Armando Iannucci
Rating: 4.0/5.0
IFC Films
106 Minutes
Why are British comedies so much more incisive, biting and damned intelligent than most of their American counterparts? I know it’s a horrible, sweeping generalization to make, but after being moved to tears by The Office, I attempted to sit through the castrated American version and quickly gave up. Yes, I have heard the Carrell version has since grown its own legs, but nothing can match the brilliance of Ricky Gervais’ original vision. So what is it?
In what could be the most scathing political satire since Dr. Strangelove, writer-director Armando Iannucci has an international crisis on his hands. A certain hawkish element in the British and American governments wants to start a war in the Middle East, a handful of peaceniks want to prevent it and many others are merely interested in keeping their jobs. Grown from the ashes of Iannucci’s BBC series The Thick Of It, In the Loop moves at a mile a minute, giving the audience little time to catch their breath between bouts of laughter.
When Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a dim-witted government minister makes a gaffe about Britain’s position on the war on national television, he opens a Pandora’s Box that leads both his country and the United States spiraling closer to invading a Middle Eastern nation. But that’s the least of his worries. He also attracts the ire of Malcolm Tucker (the brilliant and foul-mouthed Peter Capaldi) the prime minister’s director of communications who has no qualms in lathering profanity-riddled, pop-culture-laden diatribes on his underlings. As Tucker and Foster head to the United States to quell a political firestorm they encounter James Gandolfini as a general who does not want war, a State Department politician (David Rasche) who is running a secret committee to start a war and an assistant secretary of state (Mimi Kennedy) who is more concerned with being in the loop and tending to her bleeding gums than the actual war itself.
Though it would have been much more incendiary if released during the Bush years, In the Loop makes the claim that no one but narcissists, morons and children run our governing bodies. When Foster is forced to return to his hometown for requisite face time with his constituents, he is faced with a political shitstorm over a garden wall nearing collapse. It is this British concoction of the absurd with polemical discourse that makes the film so successful.
British comedy does not respect the invisible line of propriety that we draw with our comedy here. Horrible things happen to people in American comedy, but they also walk away unscathed. Just look at Monty Python. Characters are eviscerated, explode, disemboweled. In Dumb and Dumber, Jeff Daniels is forced into the biggest shit of his life when Jim Carrey slips him some laxative. If a Brit had directed Dumb and Dumber, Daniels wouldn’t have only shit his brains out; he would have died on the pot. In the Loop is a wicked, mean-spirited comedy filled with nasty people who have no qualms fucking someone or fucking someone over to get ahead. I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. Thanks, UK.
by David Harris
