Published in The Student, March 2009
In a plush, mahogany-trimmed office in the White House, ferocious spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi), treats a fresh-faced bureaucrat to a particularly brutal keelhauling - punishment for the heinous crime of being 22 years old. It is this scene, from the forthcoming British political satire In the Loop, that pops into my head as Capaldi takes a seat in a soulless hotel conference suite and rasps, “You’re probably wondering why we asked you here this morning”.
Whereas with Capaldi’s fictional Downing Street psychopath such a comment would typically precede an explosive verbal savaging, today the Glaswegian’s notorious onscreen rage seems to have been replaced with a polite weariness that presumably comes with promoting what critics have already tipped to be the best British film of 2009.
Although the film shares much of the same cast, crew and stark, hand-held aesthetic as its TV counterpart, its creator, director and writer, Armando Iannucci (the man behind Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge), insists that In the Loop is no more than the big-screen ‘brother-in-law’ of his hugely successful BBC sitcom, The Thick of It. Nevertheless, it’s a familiar format for anyone who’s seen the show: Tucker, who again appears to be perpetually on the verge of an aneurysm, dashes back and forth, biting the heads off incompetent ministers and paper shufflers who bitch, sabotage and desperately try to look cool as the government collapses into chaos and farce around their ears. In some cases the characters even seem to be renamed versions of their sitcom incarnations - Chris Addison’s Toby, for example, is essentially a reshaped, though entirely welcome variation on sneering government advisor, Oliver Reeder.
This time around, however, the stakes are raised as an unspecified war looms and a spectacularly ill-advised comment from Simon Foster MP (Tom Hollander) sets in motion the beginnings of an unsettlingly familiar and entirely pointless allied campaign in the Middle East, resulting in some fantastically strained exchanges between characters on both sides of the Atlantic. Iannucci first got the idea, he says, from a spin-off episode of The Thick of It:
“When we did the specials, which were an hour long, we saw the opposition party and it made me realise, actually, you can open it up. As long as you’ve got the world fixed in your head and the character of it, the tone of it, you can actually start pulling out a bit and seeing ‘what’s over there’. And then the story of the war and how the Brits were sort of sucked into feeling a little bit important, getting a bit giddy about going out to Washington and being in the oval office and therefore forgetting what it was they were there to do, that struck me as a funny story - so it was taking those two elements, really. And that therefore made the film have that kind of international dimension, or a bigger canvas on which we worked.”
As Iannucci, Capaldi, and Addison bring In the Loop to the Glasgow Film Festival, the quiet confidence with which they speak about the film is understandable. A wildly successful world premiere at Utah’s Sundance festival saw this bleak, almost worryingly realistic satire of US-British politics snapped up by American distributors, and the buzz around In the Loop has been steadily mounting ever since. Capaldi, it seems, has already settled into the life of a superstar - “There’ll be a croissant along in a minute, and you’ll see it has my name on it”, he gloats.
Watching the film, it seems inevitable that the critical reaction should be anything less than rapturous. At the forefront is that unique brand of dialogue that originally shot The Thick of It to success - an inspired juxtaposition of incomprehensible government jargon and sexually violent invective that, in the film, sees a crucial UN vote on whether or not to wage war figuratively described as being ‘fisted to death’, while the Oxford English Dictionary would do well to include the term ‘catastrofuck’ in next year’s edition.
It’s the product of what Capaldi describes as ‘beautifully constructed’ scriptwriting (a slightly odd phrase to attribute to the most verbally violent film released in years), and as an actor, he says, “It’s a constant frustration because I can’t speak, I can’t put a sentence together, I can’t reach the end of a sentence effectively at all - whereas the writers provide these fantastic lines. So that’s what I often get very worried about – Malcolm’s mind’s very fast and a bit of my mind’s fast but not the bit with words.”
That said, it has always been the case that this team has relied heavily on improvisation - Addison recalls receiving a ‘bollocking’ from Iannucci and Capaldi for early incidences of lapses in discipline and ignoring the golden rule: ‘stay scared of Malcolm’. The cast is now evidently a well-oiled machine but with such an established set of actors being carried over from the TV series, surely those American newcomers draughted in for the film’s transatlantic setting would find the prospect of joining them more than a little daunting (even the big names like James Gandolfini of The Sopranos and Mimi Kennedy of Dharma & Greg). Not so, says Addison, who says of the on-screen dynamic between Zack Woods and Anna Chlumsky, “They were astonishing – it was just relentless back and forth”.
“Yeah”, agrees Capaldi. “They made us feel pretty shit.”
Even still, it’s the Brits that steal the show. Watching Tucker appear in Washington, snarling, cadaverous and sandwiched between two mobile phones at all times, you almost feel like a child about to hiss at a pantomime villain - although the urge to cheer is somehow always stronger. It’s the playing-off of the Brits and the Americans against each other: to a passing tourist who requests that he minds his language, Tucker replies “Kiss my sweaty balls, you fat fuck”, while the anticlimactic return to local constituency politics is incredibly, gratifyingly dreary.
Arguably the most intriguing thing about the world of The Thick of It and In the Loop is the almost uncomfortable degree of believability its creator has built into it. According to Iannucci, this hinges largely on his habit of keeping the audience somewhat blinkered:
“In The Thick of It you never see the Prime Minister - so in this one you never see the President. I think it becomes more real and more believable if you see the people who are really there doing the day-to-day stuff rather the big people who get to go around in motorcades.”
The realism that this affords is what makes a satire like In the Loop so unique; whereas series like The West Wing and Yes, Prime Minister exposed the head of state to the audience, In the Loop retains the impression that, yes, this could well be happening in parallel to the glossy world of press conferences and election campaigns based on hope rather than cutthroat mudslinging.
The only note of caution sounded over the film’s release comes from the issue of timing. The fervent support with which much of the western world has reacted to Obama’s election, and the subsequent wave of optimism over US foreign policy begs the question of whether or not this is the wrong time for a satire of this nature.
“No! This is the right time”, comes the reply from Iannucci. “[At Sundance] the audience wanted to kind of get what had been going on in their heads about the last eight years, I think they were just relieved to see it up in front of them and sort of dealt with; but also there is that sense – and this why we’ve deliberately kept it away from being about Iraq and about Bush and made it more contemporary – there was that sense that it could happen again. Because it’s not about evil, nasty people, it’s all about slightly fragile people making occasionally the wrong decision or not quite having the right courage or convictions and the accumulation of all that, people slightly backing themselves into something.
“Now already we’re getting Hilary Clinton being very bullish about Iran and Obama talking about a surge in Afghanistan, and the Middle East and Israel is all very uncertain. I’m not saying ‘Oh, we’re going to have another war’ but I think it’s quite important that we see that you know how these things happen and it’s not to do with one person pushing a button, it’s to do with the collective atmosphere, really.”
So, depending on how the first years of the Obama presidency unfold, this could well be the film that people look back on and see as one of the defining insights into today’s political climate. For the sake of America, the UK and the rest of the world, let’s just hope not.
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