In the Loop
UK 2009
Starring: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander
Director: Armando Iannucci
Good
UK/Germany/Hungary 2008
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs
Director: Vicente Amorim
I AM not sufficiently familiar with the television series The Thick of It to be able to confirm whether the feature film spin-off, In the Loop, is as funny as or better than the parliamentary satire which inspired it. All I can say is that it is consistently chuckle-dusting entertainment, with a gloriously foul-mouthed central performance by Peter Capaldi as Number 10 spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, who ought to feature in the New Year’s Honours List for services to obscene language. Or he should if such awards actually meant anything.
Director Armando Iannucci, working with a tag team of TV sitcom writers, including Peep Show’s Jesse Armstrong, certainly deserves kudos for reinvigorating the British film comedy. Forget Ealing, this is squealing comedy celebrating the ineptitude of senior (but inferior) British politicians, in particular the fictitious Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, an actor who specialises in playing spinelessness and imbecility, although not always both at the same time).
Foster intimates that an unspecified war in the Middle East is “not unforeseeable” and it is Tucker to the rescue, trying to prevent him from making further dangerous public utterances. The problem is that Foster’s new special advisor (Chris Addison) secures him an opportunity to attend a Foreign Office meeting with the Americans in which he is expected to be “meat in the room”. Foster escalates his uninformed rhetoric and flies to Washington to become part of a lobby group to prevent war.
Quite apart from the rapid plot twists that up the ante, the film impresses through its unequivocal lack of concessions to a non-British (and non-television) audience. When Foster’s director of communications (Gina McKee) tells Tucker that an issue is “not in her purview”, Tucker tells her to “fuck off back to Cranford”. There is a timely reference to MPs’ recent travails when Foster explains that he masturbates to wildlife documentaries rather than pornography because he does not want porn to be listed as a Member’s interest. The dialogue also makes memorable use of the physical appearances of the cast with James Gandolfini (as a peace-seeking American general) giving a particularly memorable brush-off to Addison’s advisor.
The film does not really need Steve Coogan as one of Foster’s constituents complaining about an unstable garden wall. He performs at a different comic register from the rest of the cast – that is, highlighting the caricature. Still, In the Loop is an inspiration to British screenwriters. Don’t bother to make the characters sympathetic or undergo a learning experience. Present them unravelling slowly, inexorably and pathetically.
However funny the film is, I could not claim it to be realistic. The one Foreign Office civil servant depicted is shown listening to music in his office – something that never happens. Nor would a fax machine be destroyed so wilfully by one of Tucker’s deputies. Has he any idea how long it takes to order a new one?
Patrick Mulcahy
IT HAS taken nearly three decades for Good, CP Taylor’s award-winning 1981 play, to reach the screen. It’s unfortunate for all concerned that it does so with memories of two thematically similar, considerably superior movies still fresh in the memory. Like Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2005), Good is the story of a Nazi-era relationship so unlikely that it sounds like the set-up for a particularly tasteless joke: the Dutch picture was a sensitive love-story between an undercover Jewish resistance-fighter and a Gestapo chief; this time the central figures are Jewish doctor, Maurice (Jason Isaacs) and his best friend, John (Viggo Mortensen), an academic who, largely as a result of circumstances, ends up as a member of the SS and one who takes part – in full uniform, albeit somewhat passively – in the Kristallnacht atrocity of 1938.
A self-effacing intellectual, John’s theories about euthanasia are enthusiastically embraced by Germany;s new rulers – the Nazi hierarchy seeking philosophical justification for their murderous ambitions. His ascent through the Nazi ranks – initially an opponent of their politics, he becomes a purely “honorary” member, he finds himself compromised into increasingly active participation – is a kind of bumbling innocent’s progress. He only very belatedly realises the full horrors of the Final Solution.
In this regard, Good is in some ways a more adult-oriented version of Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas from last year, in which the audience is always three or four steps ahead of the “innocent” protagonist. But while this blinkered confusion is explicable with regard to a child, it’s a rather different situation when the film is built around an intelligent, cultured, engaged man like Good’s John.
As the story unfolds, his tale feels more like a contrived political parable than an organic, plausible narrative. The over-complicated structure, switching back and forth between timeframes, doesn’t help, while the dialogue tends towards the baldly sententious. (“People are what matter”, “Anything that makes people happy can’t be bad, can it?”) when it isn’t striking an unhelpfully anachronistic note (“I’m a Jew. You’re a Nazi. End of story”).
This is a mannered, stilted kind of period-prestige picture, with a mannered, stilted performance from Mortensen at its core. We never get around the fact that this is a film which expects us to feel at least some degree of sympathy for a member of the SS, however “accidental” this status may be, and however admirable the underlying idea of showing how easily well-meaning individuals can be led down extremely dark pathways.
Neil Young
