Saw The Death of Stalin, a film which is a comedy, in spite of its title and subject matter. Indeed, the plot follows the pant-shitting panic of the heads of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death. I enjoyed it a lot.
The film contains a strange mix of tragedy and comedy. There's an element of whimsy in the fact that an insurgent's note wishing death upon Stalin is the actual cause of his death, but there's an element of realism in that Stalin, reading the note, chuckles to himself and later on that it's stuffed into the pocket of one of the other bureaucrats with an indifferent grunt. These men are realists pretending to be idealists, their power magnifying their smallness.
The film is pretty funny though. In the spirit of In The Loop and other political dramas, it mostly centers around petty squabbles, men in suits jockeying for power, overreacting, stuttering, dithering, frantically browbeating each other into going along with their plans which lead nowhere. There's a lot of humor to be had from these dower grey men just standing in sumptuous halls of power and being catty bitches to each other.
From what I've heard, the film was fairly accurate to life as well. Of course liberties were taken for the sake of comedy, but Lavrentiy Beriya apparently really was like that. Likewise Khrushchev. Michael Palin plays a hilariously intense Molotov and Jeffrey Tambor plays a wonderfully limp stand-in Stalin. There's an element of grimness, but a fair amount of silliness too. It's as though The Lives of Others was made as a comedy.
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