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In The Loop

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Armando Iannucci. Cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Chris Addison, Gina McKee, Mimi Kennedy, James Gandolfini, Anna Chlumsky, Steve Coogan

 

Description: Tenacious communications chief Malcolm Tucker is hurriedly called into action to minimize the damage created by British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster, after the minister claims that a US and British backed war is "unforeseeable". At the insistence of the Prime Minister, Foster heads for Washington accompanied by new aide Toby, while Director of Communications Judy papers the cracks back home. Foster soon finds himself embroiled in a tug of war between the pro- and anti-war factions, the latter spearheaded by US Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy Karen Clarke and US General Miller.

Country: UK. 2009. 105mins

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In The Loop pauses for thought

 

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One of the banes of British screen comedies — as recently and witlessly witnessed in Lesbian Vampire Killers but extended down the years — is the quality of the writing. That goes, with alarming regularity, for American comedy too. Mercifully, writer-director Armando Iannucci’s political satire is a rare exception.

His often hilarious repartee, expressed through characters on the very edge of farce but near enough to reality to give pause for thought, proliferates. In the Loop is like a British version of a Marx Brothers movie in that no sooner is one round of colourful invective blurted out than another three follow in rat-tat succession. Of course, the Hays Code didn’t allow the Marx Brothers to swear but they probably would have if given half a chance. Nor did they deal much in politics — but, given half a chance…

Here, those who govern us on both sides of the Atlantic are given lines to die for. Possibly, there are a few too many for the film’s slim structure to bear, and some brief respite would have helped. But the cast, a mixture of Americans and Brits, spit the lines out with an élan that suggests something akin to gratefulness, almost as if they can’t quite believe in such good fortune.

Bits and pieces of In the Loop’s highly coloured dialogue are destined to be quoted with the greatest affection but you probably won’t recall the whole 104 minutes with quite the same enthusiasm. It looks more like TV than cinema (deliberately so, according to Iannucci), though the hand-held camerawork is kept at bay more in this follow-up to the television series The Thick of It.

In the film, Peter Capaldi reprises his TV role as Tucker, Number 10’s director of communications, the attack dog supposedly modelled on Alastair Campbell, Blair’s implacable press secretary.

He remains as funny as he takes his politicking to the international sphere. There’s a rush on towards a Middle Eastern war, vaguely in the manner of Iraq, and Simon Foster, the Minister from the Department of International Development (Tom Hollander), engenders Tucker’s wrath for saying on radio that the proposed war is “unforeseeable”.

Foster is then caught up in a war between the hawks and doves of both sides and, being an ambitious minnow, hankers after being a big fish in a much larger pool.

Courted by a top American general (James Gandolfini) and the Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy (Mimi Kennedy), who believe like him that war should be avoidable, he tries to backtrack but is led towards the pro-conflict side, marshalled in peremptory manner by David Rasche’s chief American hawk.

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Constantly harried by Tucker, the minister also has to deal with a constituent back home (Steve Coogan) whose mother’s garden wall may be about to collapse.

After last week’s shenanigans at Number 10, In the Loop carries more than a whiff of truth about the way we are governed, in the way that good farce should. If clearly based on the Blair-Bush years and thus positioned a little off-centre now that Obama the Great is in charge, the film still posits a conspiracy-versus-muddle scenario that may yet seem appropriate when clearer eyes look across the Atlantic.

Its drawback is a scattergun approach that leaves no one looking other than absurd, so that you can laugh it off too easily and might even tire of its implacable cynicism. But the screenplay (a collaborative effort between Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche) and the playing, rather than the direction, deserve most of the praise that In the Loop is sure to attract.

This is virtuoso stuff, right down to the smaller but still pivotal parts played by Anna Chlumsky, an American intern of the type who might have caught the eye of a certain Democrat President, Gina McKee, the harried British director of communications, and Chris Addison as the minister’s hopeless right-hand man on his trip to Washington and the UN.

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