In the Loop

I've just finished my most enjoyable movie experience of the year, the scabrously funny In the Loop, directed by Armando Iannucci and written by Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, and Tony Roche. That's a lot of writers, but this script is absolutely packed with gems of dialogue that are laugh-out-loud hilarious and dripping with seething venom. I'm writing this review quickly before I have a chance to forget some of them.

The film, which owes a lot to the bureaucratic nightmares conjured by Joseph Heller in Catch-22 and Good as Gold, details the skullduggery concerning mid-level state department officials in London and Washington over a prospective invasion of an unnamed middle-east country. On one side is the acid-tongued Prime Minister's Director of Communication (Peter Capaldi, in a bravura performance). On the other is a weak-kneed minister (Tom Hollander) who creates a firestorm when he tells an interviewer that war is "unforeseeable." He and his new aide, Chris Addison, head down the rabbit hole to Washington, where they are enlisted by an Assistant Secretary of State (Mimi Kennedy), who is in a pissing war with a fellow Assistant (David Rasche). Kennedy's assistant (Anna Chlumsky) has written a paper listing very good reasons against war, which becomes a political football.

Also in the mix is a U.S. general deliciously played by James Gandolfini, who dominates each scene he is in. He is variously referred to as "General Flintstone" and "General Shrek" by those in conflict with him. But he also has one of the best lines in the film when he describes war as something that, when one sees it, one never wants to go back, unless absolutely necessary. "Like France," he adds.

If Capaldi is the electricity that makes this film hum, others in the cast are also excellent. Hollander, in particular, is funny just by how Iannucci uses his vertically challenged size (which was also used to a similar effect in his turn as Mr. Collins in Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice). Hollander's character is variously described as sounding like a "chicken with a wasp up its ass," and "a Nazi Julie Andrews." He is also chided by an aide, after he complains that he as a stressful job, that he "is not a lion-tamer or a snooker player."

Visually the film is pretty thread-bare, looking like an episode of The Office (UK or US version, take your pick). It's the Mametesque script, which will be confounding to those who have to sanitize these things for airplanes, that sings brilliantly. The writers have perfectly captured the double-think of government functionaries, whether it's the manner in which they name controversial committees with the dullest names they can think of, or how a supplicant walks around with a squash racket strapped to his back, hoping his boss will ask him to play. My only complaint is that because of some thick British Isles accents, I missed some of the lines. I'm eager to see it again, with subtitles.