Dir. Armando Iannucci, 2009, UK, 105 mins
Cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini
Review by Mike Bartlett
They say satire ends up aping the very people it attacks. So it's fitting that the first filmmaker to really tackle Blair in a feature-length comedy should be Armando Iannucci, who resembles nothing so much as a New Labour city boy fascinated by the culture of spin. And it's also fitting that his first film should, as part of UK cinema's desperate desire to hook the US market, be a carefully calibrated portrait of that “special relationship”.
But there is nothing compromised about Iannucci's vision. The transfer of his award-winning BBC series 'The Thick Of It' to the big screen has not blunted its satirical edge nor softened its wit. For a start, Iannucci has abjured the star option and bravely retained the same cast. They all do him proud, not least Peter Capaldi, who is simply outstanding as the foul-mouthed, Alistair Campbell-like press secretary, Malcolm. Here, he finds himself tidying up after the Secretary of International Development, Simon Foster (Hollander), who has inadvertently got himself involved in Washington's agitations for war in the Middle East . The action flicks between the UK and the US as the two Governments secretly conspire to conjure up the requisite “intelligence” to force a vote in the UN.
The parallels with Iraq are obvious, but Iannucci never forces the comparison; only a few buried references in the dialogue to "assisted suicide" and Clare Short's infamous justification for doing the “wrong thing” tip the viewer off. Instead, this clever, oblique satire targets the culture that led to such decisions. The intricacies of political debate are nowhere to be seen; the focus is on playing the media and the smokescreens needed to maintain credibility. Thus Iannucci could be accused of sidestepping the appalling reality of going to war. But that's the point – the establishment has become so amoral as to treat this as a side issue.
Tom Hollander's minister frets and prevaricates about the right phrases to use, the right time to stand up at a meeting, while the Prime Minister himself is completely absent throughout. Meanwhile, press secretaries are given free reign to terrorise MPs and ride roughshod over the concerns of people, unlike themselves, who are voted for by the electorate. And these poor souls — very much last place in the scheme of things — are only represented in cameo by Steve Coogan, giving a hilarious turn as a constituent banging on about a garden wall. Laughing at such “pettiness” leads to the one and only caveat I have about the film – that, in its fascination with Malcolm's backstage exploits and belittling of the “ordinary man on the street,” it almost glamorises spin as a sophisticated form of politics.
But Coogan's subplot is also important for the way it throws the events in Washington into relief. British politicians on the world stage can be undone by the trivial agenda of one bloke in Northampton . Iannucci points up how antiquated and desperately inadequate such a system is when the country involved is making decisions of global import. The pathetic reality of Britain playing the role of world power is also brought home in the two finest scenes in the film, where Malcolm confronts his US nemesis Linton Barwick (an excellent performance from David Rasche) and finds himself clinging onto delusions of grandeur in the face of his administration's clear status of lapdog to American interests. Here, Iannucci's dialogue is at its most sparkling, keeping up the tempo and tone of a fast-paced comedy with an undercurrent of genuine tension.
It's that combination that underpins the whole enterprise. Make no mistake — this is an angry film. It may wear the sharp-suited clothes of jocular cynicism, but that only serves to point up the lack of moral indignation in its characters. They represent a system divorced from any sense of ultimate responsibility — where only what is said, and not what is done, is of any importance. In the end, the document challenging the war is modified to become the very intelligence that will swing the vote. What more chilling metaphor could there be for the conversion of politics of value into politics of contingency — Blair's true legacy?
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