By Miles Trahan
In the age of Judd Apatow, the American comedy film has undergone something of a renaissance. It seems more so now than through the entirety of the previous decade we’re seeing comedies that are unafraid to push boundaries, to go totally for broke for the sake of a well-executed punchline, to warm the cockles of our hearts, knock the wind out of us, have us gasping in frantic horror or fiendish delight. To put it bluntly, the landscape of American comedy seems fresher and more transcendent now than it has in decades.
Leave it to the Brits to knock us on our collective asses and show us how it’s really done.
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While owing equally to the likes of The Office (aesthetically, at any rate), The West Wing and Dr. Strangelove, Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop takes a clear delight in blazing its own trails, consequences be damned; it’s the kind of film where nobody is safe, everybody is doomed, and we’re all watching in horror and with big, goofy grins on our faces as they plunge further and further into the murky depths. There are no heroes in In the Loop — by conventional standards everyone is just a different shade of grey, some more outwardly sinister and others just pretending to be decent folks at heart. It’s fitting, then, that Iannucci’s film — an offshoot of BBC series The Thick of It — deals almost entirely with politicians, of both the US and UK variety.
We’re dropped into the fray as it’s already unfolding, with British press officer Malcolm Tucker (a pitch-perfect Peter Capaldi) scrambling to clean up a mess created by Secretary of State for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, as much a “hero” as Capaldi is a “villain”), who claimed on a radio interview that “war is unforeseeable” — a poor choice of words since, you know, war (presumably with the Middle East, but kept appropriately vague) is exactly what the US and UK governments are brewing. To try to make amends Foster ends up digging himself even deeper by claiming that in order for one to “walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict”, a clusterfuck analogy which soon makes Foster the laughing stock of both houses and sidelines him as little more than a “meat puppet” to be used as bait between both governments. Aiding him in his non-dealings with both British and American officials alike — including David Rasche as an appropriately sinister and cunning US State Department head and James Gandolfini as a General who (gasp!) is opposed to the war in question — are aides Toby Wright (Chris Addison) and Judy (Gina McKee), who more or less spend the length of the film coddling Simon and politely condescending him while watching his political career crash and burn. For the next one hundred-odd minutes we’ll see stars rise and fall, under-handed deals being made and broken at an astonishing clip, and hear the word “fuck” uttered so frequently it would make Tony Montana blush. And you’d need to check your pulse if you don’t find the whole thing unrelentingly, blisteringly hysterical.
In the Loop presents a view of bureaucrats as only an acute parody can, presenting a cast of relative back-stabbers, liars and self-serving snobs clearly in over their heads; the higher-ups, of course, simply know how to bullshit their way into the clear. Trying to describe exactly what happens in Iannucci’s film would be an exercise in futility; suffice it to say careers will be trampled on, lies will be told, information will be warped and twisted to suit whomever’s point of view and a vague, clearly unnecessary war perpetrated with no real endgame to speak of will loom ever closer to becoming a reality.
Calling In the Loop a comedy is a little disingenuous; it’s definitely the single funniest film I’ve seen this year, and had the audience howling at what seemed like steady thirty second intervals for the entirety of the (rather brisk) runtime, but it’s largely the kind of laughter which masks pure horror — we laugh because we recognize how close to our reality this all is, and if we don’t laugh we might just break down in bitter, anguished sobs right there in the theater. For a comedy, In the Loop is more terrifying than all your Freddies, Jasons and Jigsaws put together.
We’d be clutching our armchairs in horror if only we weren’t so busy pissing our pants.
9 out of 10