This week in local theaters
IN THE LOOP
The British do comedies of squirmy humiliation and browbeating better than anyone. But as critic Steve Erickson pointed out, this screamingly funny send-up of bellicose political brinkmanship and bureaucracy fits into a grand old American tradition: the blustery farces of Preston Sturges—especially those moments where a half-dozen combatants wedge into a room and start a honking traffic jam of invective. The catalyst here is a dim-bulb development minister (a sublimely dweeby Tom Hollander) who makes an innocuous statement that war is "unforeseeable," unaware that military machinery is secretly grinding at Downing Street and the White House. ("You know they're all kids in Washington?" complains his long-suffering communications director Gina McKee. "It's like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns.") To his great misery—and the movie's delight—his office is stampeded by the prime minister's hatchet man, Peter Capaldi, an apoplectic Dark Lord of spin who'll bloody well salvage a war from this peace nonsense.
The director and co-screenwriter, British TV vet Armando Iannucci, whose BBC series The Thick of It introduced this spellbinding snake, has handed Capaldi reams of splenetic insults so combustibly profane they'd make Quentin Tarantino wince. (His rejoinder to McKee's inopportune use of "purview" is hilariously hair-curling.) As the action shifts to Washington, the voices of moderation get shoved roughly to the margins—a familiar sight—and the drumbeats of war take on a Strangelovian inevitability. It's probably better reason to cry than laugh, but the writing is so sharp and quotable, the timing so pinpoint precise, and the ensemble so inspired that the laughter comes out explosively cathartic. The movie even gives James Gandolfini his best movie role this decade as a sensible Pentagon general sucked into the machinations, using a kid's toy to crunch numbers for extra troops: "At the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you've lost." (Opens Friday at The Belcourt) JIM RIDLEY
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