Armando Iannucci films power as a room of frightened people being shouted at, and he has kept it funny for twenty years. His best work is British and small; when the volume goes up, in Veep and The Death of Stalin, the people start to shrink.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in nearly everything Armando Iannucci has made, a man in a suit is standing in a corridor being told what he thinks by somebody louder. He does not argue. He looks for the exit, finds a third person standing in it, and agrees with both of them. That is the basic Iannucci scene, filmed over and over, with a camera that looks as though it wandered in from a documentary and a script that sounds as though nobody wrote it. Somebody did.
He began in radio, with On the Hour (1991), which became The Day Today (1994) and produced Alan Partridge, whom Steve Coogan played in Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1994), written with Patrick Marber, and I'm Alan Partridge (1997). That was comedy of embarrassment: one fool, one format, an audience that knows how a presenter ought to behave. The turn came with The Thick of It (2005), which moved the fool into government and gave him a minder. It is still the best thing he has made. In the Loop (2009) took the same offices to Washington and towards a war, and Veep (2012) stayed there for seven seasons, though Iannucci left after the fourth. Since then: The Death of Stalin (2017), The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) and the series Avenue 5 (2020).
What works is the ensemble, on screen and on the page. Simon Blackwell, Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche and Ian Martin gave the insults a job: each one changes who in the scene can speak with confidence. Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker is the clearest case, the one fixed point in a building of people changing their minds. On In the Loop Jamie Cairney's handheld camera and Anthony Boys and Billy Sneddon's cutting move the exchanges so fast that we have to listen across the group rather than wait for the star. We enjoyed Capaldi's bullying more than we should have, and the film means us to, because that enjoyment is how these offices run.
What does not work is the same thing turned up. Every project we have reviewed left us the same reservation: the abuse gets so loud that it crowds out the people delivering it. In Veep nobody believes anything, and over 65 episodes that stops looking like observation and becomes a way of never writing a scene in which somebody means it. In The Death of Stalin the broader clowning sometimes makes the danger recede, though Simon Russell Beale brings it back. Iannucci has said the job is "allowing the story to tell the director what the style should be". For twenty years the story has told him the same thing.
Start with The Thick of It, then In the Loop, then the middle five seasons of Veep. Bring a tolerance for being sworn at, and do not expect anyone on screen to mean a word.
Biography
Armando Iannucci is a Scottish satirist, writer, director and producer. Born in Glasgow on 28 November 1963 to Italian parents, he studied at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford.
He began his career at BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4. With Chris Morris he co-created the radio series On the Hour, which transferred to television as The Day Today (1994). A character from the series, Alan Partridge, featured in I'm Alan Partridge (1997). Iannucci created, wrote and directed the political sitcom The Thick of It (2005). His later work includes the feature film In the Loop (2009), the HBO series Veep (2012) and the film The Death of Stalin (2017).
