In the Loop
Director: Armando Iannucci
Writers: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche, with additional dialogue by Ian Martin
Producers: Kevin Loader, Adam Tandy
Stars: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini, Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky, Enzo Cilenti, Paul Higgins, Mimi Kennedy, David Rasche
The true legacy of the late George Orwell is in his master’s grasp of the two titular subjects of his famous essay: “Politics and the English Language”. He articulated with more insight than any before or since the myriad ways the former violates the latter (or any language, really), in order to obscure sins and sanctify the horrific. Being that every nation is run by human beings who invariably have more authority than virtue, no country is immune from the abuse he observed. When a politician starts to speak, assume the worst. And when they begin speaking in colorful, vague metaphors, head for the bomb shelter.
In the Loop is an Orwellian comedy; a rare breed if it is a breed at all. It concerns a war but we never see a shot fired. Instead it is about words – dull, confused, misleading, ass-covering words, and the people who speak them; and how those people use them to launch a war. An Orwellian comedy is going to be gallows humor, and this spin-off from the BBC’s scabrous TV series The Thick of It is gallows humor of the most gut-busting variety – a ruthless and ingenious symphony of language at its most filthy. Swearing may offend delicate sensibilities, but this language gets people killed.
Of course there is swearing – deliciously blue. The writers from the TV series (with which you need no familiarity in order to enjoy this film) include a “swearing consultant” named Ian Martin. Their script sounds like Aaron Sorkin and Harold Pinter got drunk together, with Terry Southern pouring the drinks. Swearing of the most astounding variety is the primary tool of Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), a wiry, barking press relations enforcer working for the British government. His job is to whip soft-brained members of Parliament who speak with dangerous amounts of candor and clarity in public, then bully journalists into thinking that those people didn’t really say what they just said. Capaldi (and a seemingly-even-angrier protégé played by Paul Higgins) are marvelous suited horrors, nightmare bosses who bait you into playing their game, then destroy you at it.
His latest problem politician is Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a lowly Minister who panicked in an interview. Asked about the prospect of a war everyone knows is being planned but no one would be so rude as to admit is being planned, he blabbed that war is “unforeseeable”, which sets in motion a furious parade of denials, clarifications, disavowals, real-or-fake mullings of resignation, and committee meetings where officials are conscripted to be “meat in the room”.
We see that there are three camps in government – the hapless, the hopelessly well-meaning, and the cynical halls-of-power warriors who eat those wimps’ lunches. Foster, whose bumbling attempts to appear usefully ruminative and serious are producing more and more bamboozling quotes for the press, finds himself a new celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. He (traveling with an earnest young aide played by Chris Addison) is invited to continue hanging himself in front of every available microphone in order that those agitating for war can point to the alarming things he’s saying as confirmation of an urgent need for action.
Hollander earned a great deal of money playing at shallow villainy in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but his true gifts with delivery are on display here. He shoves his foot into his mouth with sweaty compulsion, trying to use fine-sounding nonsense as a security blanket. In the Loop is at its best when showing just how far out on a crazy limb people who speak in political tongues can find themselves – like when a character, grasping for an explanation to why he cheated on his girlfriend, makes a serious attempt to propose that he did it to prevent the war.
While the series was strictly British, the film broadens its perspective to include American government officials. A State Department diplomat (Mimi Kennedy) knows that her policy colleague Linton Barwick (David Rasche) is chairing a secret War Planning Committee, so she dispatches an aide (Anna Chlumsky) to find the Committee with the most boring-sounding name, knowing that he will be found there. Meanwhile, an old general (James Gandolfini) lumbers around the Pentagon, resigned to trying to do the right thing within this bureaucracy but having little faith he’ll achieve it. He makes chillingly blunt predictions like: “Twelve thousand troops. But that’s not enough. That’s the amount that are going to die. And at the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you’ve lost.” When someone like Barwick is poetically opining “All roads lead to Munich!”, that General sounds like the one to listen to.
Barwick is an unforgettable character, a true grinning shark; a man who disdains foul language but cannot conceal his hunger to create battlefields. Rasche brings total relish to Barwick’s war-fevered syntax. When he and Tucker meet, what they chew over like fighting dogs is not the truth – ignored as meager meat long ago – but their authority over the perception of onrushing events. This is a game where, when the code-named source of the most threatening intelligence about the country-to-be-invaded is found to be a hopelessly unreliable liar and drunk, they simply change his code name and re-submit his findings as fresh and newly-frightening, because to go to war without dire intelligence would be unthinkable.
In its aesthetics, In the Loop looks like an episode of The Office – cringingly deadpan and fly-on-the-wall. But it’s predictions like the one the General makes that gives it its amazing bite; we know where these nasty boobs and the words they speak are going to lead us, and we laugh so much that we do not do the other thing.