Film review: In the loop

Published on Thursday 16 April 2009 18:53

A WEEK is a long time in politics, but it's a blip in filmmaking terms, which makes cinematic political satire a tough nut to crack.

The vagaries of film production mean that a rapid response to current events is all but impossible; success hinges instead on the ability to tap into something that's timeless yet so of the moment that if you didn't know any better you'd swear the script had been ripped from current headlines. In the Loop is one such film, and it's a measure of how apt a title Armando Iannucci has chosen for his directorial debut that this skewering of modern British politics seems to grow more prophetic by the day.

Inspired by his small-screen political comedy, The Thick of It, when In the Loop premiered at the Sundance and Glasgow film festivals earlier this year, its riff on the star-struck nature of the British-American "special relationship" seemed like it would guarantee it some ongoing topicality in the age of Obama. Then the news broke that Jacqui Smith's husband had charged a couple of pay-per-view adult movies to her expense account. Suddenly, an amusing, throwaway joke in the film involving a government minister debating the downside of watching porn in his hotel room seemed destined to be the film's big talking-point.

Yet even this has been superseded in the past six days thanks to former Gordon Brown "enforcer" Damien McBride. The revelation this past weekend of his plans to set in motion a smear campaign against the Tories has reinforced In the Loop's entire raison d'tre: to expose – in savagely funny fashion – the ruthless, often poisonous culture of spin-doctoring that exists in modern government.

As with its TV predecessor, this expos takes the form of a Whitehall farce fuelled by a furious tirade of jokes and baroque, highly quotable dialogue delivered by increasingly frantic characters trying to hold their world together while it rapidly unravels around them. The main difference is that Iannucci has expanded it to incorporate Washington, building his story around the run up to a proposed war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country and painting a scarily authentic picture of the political scene on both sides of the Atlantic as an absurd rats' nest full of compromised civil servants scurrying around advancing their own agendas and careers. If it weren't so funny, you'd probably cry.

But it is funny, and not in a chuckle-along-to-prove-how-clever-you-are sort of way. Iannucci, along with co-writers Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche, have crafted a raucous script that if nothing else proves that, when done properly, swearing can be big and clever. With a rat-a-tat-ferocity and mind-boggling inventiveness, the film succeeds in turning the air blue with some deliciously depraved dialogue. Of course the swearing and abuse has a purpose; it's a film about spin, and as such, is all about the way language can be used as a weapon – one that further down the line can have very real casualties.

Most of the darkly poetic oral assaults that keep the laugh quotient so high come courtesy of Peter Capaldi, who reprises his role as Malcolm Tucker, Downing Street's venom-vomiting director of communications. Assigned to keep a tight rein on the release of information regarding the encroaching military conflict, Tucker's primary focus for damage limitation is Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), an up-and-coming minister who has unwittingly stumbled into Tucker's line of fire by describing war as "unforeseeable" during a morning radio interview. If that wasn't bad enough, in an effort to dig himself out of this hole, he willingly walks into a media ambush on the street and improvises a statement about how the country needs to be "ready to climb the mountain of conflict".

The rapidity with which these seemingly minor gaffs are seized upon and blown out of proportion is emphasised by the way Foster is thrust into the transatlantic debate about war. James Gandolfini plays brilliantly against type as General Miller, a war-weary Pentagon official who has aligned himself with the Doves to put a stop to war-mongering Secretary of State Linton Barwick (David Rasche), who has already had Simon's "mountain of conflict" line made into a bumper sticker.

Like The Thick of It, In The Loop is shot in an intimate, hand-held style which, far from making it feel like an extended TV episode, actually adds to its cinematic quality. The faux documentary look may seem redundant given that no film crew would have access to the kind of material presented on screen, but such a literal view of Iannucci's approach misses the point. The verit approach works as further comment on the way spin is no longer able to effectively contain a story because, well, these days it is the story. And, if you're in any doubt, just check out the news from the past week.