I love movies where everyone seems to have a dozen extremely mean retorts ready at all times. In The Loop takes this a step further, as every character seems to speak only in barbed retorts.
It.
Is.
Great.
Those familiar with The Death of Stalin, Veep, Avenue 5, or The Thick of It will recognize this particular strain of extremely pithy and well-timed insults, although it may be surprising to learn that all of those shows/movies and In The Loop share a writer, Armando Iannucci. Iannucci also wrote episodes of I’m Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan’s best-known vehicle and no stranger to very mean-spirited comedy delivered by blowhards.
I think that Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Peter Capaldi are (two of the funniest people on the planet? –Ed.) the best at delivering Iannucci’s dialogue (Zach Woods a close third), although everyone in these comedies has a chance to be just fuckin’ brutal to someone else for some screw-up, minor error, or colossal blunder. James Gandolfini (as Lt. Gen. Miller) has an unbelievable scene with Capaldi in which the two are squaring off in the UN headquarters as they scramble to prevent a war (or are they promoting the war? The plot moves quickly and one must climb the mountain of conflict). And the scene is so good because each guy gets his hits in. But it is just incredible to see Gandolfini, one of the finest actors ever at using body language, towering over Capaldi’s character Malcom Tucker and using every bit of his physicality… and it only works until Mal finds a weakness and he goes in for the kill, leaving Miller furious and deflated. But don’t take my word for it; just go watch it.
What Iannucci gets that a lot of other comedy writers don’t is that he doesn’t punch downward: Malcolm Tucker and Selina Meyer and the rest of the characters in these universes are attacking blowhards, career politicians, trust-fund kids with inordinate amounts of power, sycophants, and each other. Look at how Mal treats his assistant in comparison to how fuckin’ brutal he attacks Tom Hollander’s Simon Foster and Gina McKee’s Judy.
OK, so basically, this political satire is about several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, being on the verge of a military intervention. And a well-meaning but guileless minister of a small constituency, Simon Foster, makes a monstrous gaffe when asked about the war during an interview that was supposed to be about repairing a wall in a small town. Soon his gaffe (“we must climb the mountain of conflict;” “war is unforeseeable”) has escalated the geopolitical tension and everyone is scrambling to get their public opinion ducks in a row as it becomes clear that an invasion will happen.
2009 was the tail end of my living in Ohio. I had graduated college and was working at an extremely shady book publisher. The owner of the book line was the type of sociopath who would not be out of place among the career grifters of In The Loop. If you’ve not encountered this kind of person in real life, I can assure you that it is exhausting and not at all amusing. I started every shift knowing that something chaotic would happen but it was impossible to know the extent or from where it would come. I stuck with it through a million red flags and it finally took relocation out of state to snap me out of the unhealthy dynamic.
I’ve encountered other entrepreneurs in this vein, people who stumbled into a profitable situation and rather than acknowledge it was equal parts luck and good timing, they chalked up the success to themselves, and felt that they could do no wrong. I imagine everyone who has worked in food service, especially for a small business rather than a corporate chain, has those kinds of figures in their past. There’s no need to spill the tea, because y’all have your own horror stories and mortal enemies/managers from those jobs. I’d assume that a large part of the appeal of Gordon Ramsay is that he gets to dunk on those people and be mean as hell and they can’t really say anything. I don’t like Ramsay, but it does bring a twinkle to my eye imagining him laying into various shitty bosses from my past.
And I guess that Malcolm Tucker et al. fulfill a similar bit of wish fulfillment, for who hasn’t wanted to wilt some trust fund kid with an MBA who fell upward into being a US senator with absurd amounts of power and not a shred of backbone or common sense?
Other 2009 candidates: Avatar; Up; The Hurt Locker; Ninja Assassin; Antichrist; In the Loop; Public Enemies; Watchmen; Coraline
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.