Nosh 104: 'The Death of Stalin,' 'Unsane' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Death of Stalin and Unsane

The Death of Stalin

In the mid-1950s an American TV program offered a grim, pseudo-documentary take on the 1953 death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. I was a kid, but mesmerized. The names of the old Communist Party Politburo still resonate for me, but now with a tinny effect, thanks to director Armando Iannucci. His The Death of Stalin, based upon a Titan Comics graphic, reaches for wild lampoon that turns into an embalmed cackle.

The comedy is curdled by the fact that Stalin, despite his Papa Bear moustache (now fronting the face of actor Adrian McLaughlin), remains scary. This is the happy guy who said that “to choose one’s victim, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to stake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.” The power maniac slaughtered his own countrymen, converted Politburo service into Russian roulette, defeated Hitler (after first losing his nerve), and began a paranoid purge of a “Zionist doctors plot” before his stroke, in bed, on March 1, 1953. During his last four days medical care was minimal (including leeches), while his successors plotted. Some researchers now think Stalin was poisoned by KGB chief and sadist Lavrenti Beria.

The Kremlin-like settings are impressive, but the casting might better fit the Moscow, Idaho zoo. As fat Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s favorite butt of humor at vodka-soaked parties, lean Steve Buscemi hurls New York actor sarcasms. Britain’s rotund Simon Russell Beale plays Beria as if he were Uncle Fester becoming  Rasputin. As shifty heir-in-waiting Georgi Malenkov, Jeffrey Tambor seems to be an onion dome fond of weeping. Michael Palin somehow confused cold, phlegmatic Vyacheslav Molotov with another foreign secretary, Britain’s elegant Anthony Eden. As famously bald war hero Marshal Georgi Zhukov, built like a T-34 tank, the tall, handsome Jason Isaacs sports a fine head of hair and a vast crop of medals. Being Slavic is equated with fits of hysteria as the shenanigans fall somewhere between Marxism and the Marx Bros. The movie missed its musical cue: Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin, but the film’s main music is by Tchaikovsky.

Political satire is a hard game (rare successes: Ninotchka, The Great Dictator, Wag the Dog, Dr. Strangelove). Iannocci slathers on slapstick, dud gags, an autopsy, a zinger about Abbott and Costello (should be Martin and Lewis, as 1953 was a big year for them). I enjoyed the phrase “unauthorized narcissism,” and the way Buscemi barks about lusting for Grace Kelly. The Stalinist Stooges bumble around in a flop-sweat of defrosting terror until the transparently evil Beria is shot dead, then cremated in a courtyard (odd echo of Hitler’s end). The laughs are lost in the samovar, or maybe Stalin’s moustache.

Unsane

Steven Soderbergh made three asinine Danny Ocean comedies, which took macho hipness down to ankle level. But in a checkered career, playing with a chessman’s verve, he’s also given us sex, lies and videotape, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, King of the Hill, the rustic fun of  Logan Lucky and TV’s grimly effective The Knick (beefcake fans enjoy Magic Mike). For Unsane, a cheap thriller shot very quickly, Soderbergh directed, edited and photographed using his three iPhone 7 Plus cameras fitted with different lenses. To say he “phoned the film in” would be a little glib.

Fresh from dewy Queen Liz II on The Crown, Claire Foy turns American, haggard and desperate as Sawyer, a sharp biz-wiz who fled an obsessed stalker in Boston. Now she gets trapped in a mental therapy “clinic” where (presto demento!) her lovesick chaser turns up on the staff. At first there are good jabs about shady medical practice and insurance scamming, but the bear-like stalker (Joshua Leonard) hauls the story into pulp, with creepy implausibility. Soderbergh’s images dangle the vague premise that maybe this is just Sawyer’s nightmare as shots turn fuzzy with shadows, faces loom in fish-eyed exaggeration. Unsane underwhelms, despite good work by Jay Pharaoh as a calmly decent patient, a spry cameo by Matt Damon, and murmuring hints of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. I have read comment comparing this movie to Kafka, but Soderbergh probably got that out of his system with his vivid, faltering Kafka in 1991.  

SALAD (A List)

Bravura Film Portrayals of Real Political Leaders:

Charles Laughton as Henry in The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933; Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939; Charles Chaplin as Hinkle (Hitler) in The Great Dictator, 1940; Nikolai Cherkassov as Ivan in Ivan the Terrible, I and II, 1944-46; Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, 1949; Alec Guinness as Benjamin Disraeli in The Mudlark, 1950; Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata!, 1952; Herbert Lom as Napoleon in War and Peace, 1956; Bob Hope as Jimmy Walker in Beau James, 1957; Ben Kingsley as the Mahatma in Gandhi, 1982; Gerard Depardieu as Georges Danton in Danton, 1983; Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Secret Honor, 1984; Paul Newman as Earl Long in Blaze, 1989; Gary Sinise as Harry in Truman, 1995; Madonna as Evita Peron in Evita, 1996; Cate Blanchettt as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth, 1998; Eriq Ebouaney as Patrice Lumumba in Lumumba, 2000; Gael Garcia Bernal as Ernesto “Che” Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004; Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall, 2004; Paul Giamatti as John Adams, 2008; Filippo Timi as Benito Mussolini in Vincere, 2010; Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, 2011; Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, 2012; Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson in All the Way, 2016; Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, 2017. 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

On June 29, 1940, Orson Welles shot his first scene for Citizen Kane: the newsreel staff crammed into a screening room, being told to track down Kane’s “Rosebud.” For ten hours the neophyte filmed, “rearranging his actors, asking for more overlapping of dialog, making sure there was enough cigarette smoke filtering through the light from the projection booth … He attempted shots never successfully used in a film before, (even) having the camera shoot directly into blazing arcs. A special lens coating had to be used on the camera to cut the glare of lights shining into it.” (Shot as a “test,” the debut footage was used after minor editing. From Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A unique entertainment, Funny Face (1957) “endures with few wrinkles. John Russell Taylor’s The Hollywood Musical calls it ‘about as near flawless as one can hope for in an imperfect world, (and) also virtually the death-knell of the intimate, integrated musical as we had come to know and love it.’ It lost in all four Oscars nominations. A year later Gigi, a candy-box musical rehab of Hepburn’s Broadway hit, starring Leslie Caron, won nine statues.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Newsreel editor Rawlston (Philip Van Zandt, right) orders reporter Thompson (William Alland) to find Rosebud “dead or alive,” in Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland).

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