Loopy

Ever since it played at Sundance last winter, I’ve been looking forward to Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop at least as eagerly as any new movie I’ve seen this year. That should probably be kept in mind when I say that I ended up being a little disappointed with it. In the Loop marks Iannucci’s debut as a movie director, but he’s already well established as a writer, producer, and director in British TV, especially for his role in the creation of the character Alan Partridge, the cretinous TV host played by Steve Coogan, and The Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi as a political spin expert named Malcolm Tucker who works for the British prime minister. In the Loop is a spin-off that deals with Tucker’s role in shaping public opinion and cooking intelligence during the lead-up to the Iraq War. (It also features a subplot involving Coogan, unrecognizable in heavy disguise, as an angry constituent.) In the Loop features a remarkable cast of comic heavy hitters, some of whom (such as James Gandolfini as a Colin Powell-like general who tries to short-circuit the march to war but who backtracks on his promise to resign if he fails, citing his responsibility to his “boys”) don’t get the chance to play real comedy often enough, and many of whom don’t have the high profiles that their talent deserves. (That includes Mimi Kennedy as a diplomat who’s the most prominent anti-war voice in the room and David Rasche as a Rumsfeld clone named Linton Barwick; for American audience, at least, it also includes Capaldi, probably best known here as Peter Reigert’s lovestruck sidekick in Local Hero back in 1983.) The movie is expertly performed and parts of it are pretty funny; I enjoyed a lot of it and wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing it. But the uniformly slavering critical notices have painted it as an audacious, explosively funny political satire on a par with Dr. Strangelove, and to me it looked more like–well, an extended version of a TV show that satirizes the headline events of seven years ago. (The movie is also being acclaimed for the unprecedented inventiveness of its characters’ profanity, and I also thought it was a little disappointing, after all the buildup, in that area as well–but then, I’m a Larry Sanders Show fanatic who was weaned on Richard Pryor records.)

In the Loop begins with the news that Simon, an amoeba-like cabinet minister played by Tom Hollander has told a radio interviewer that the war that the major players are all trying to get primed for takeoff is “unforeseeable.” To a great degree both the movie’s point of view and its comic approach can be boiled down to the moment when Malcolm, trying to make this gaffe disappear, barks into a cell phone that Simon didn’t say what he said: “You may have heard him say it, but he didn’t, and that’s a fact.” If Tucker is an updated version of Nigel Hawthorne’s Machiavellian schemer on Yes, Minister, then what’s new about him is that he replaces the Hawthorne character’s labyrinthine ingenuity with sheer brazenness, daring anyone to call him on how blatantly he’s contradicting reality itself. After he and Simon cross the pond and get involved in the war planning effort at its red-hot center, he meets his match in Rasche’s Linton Barwick, who scolds him for his behavior in what he calls “this sacred place,” adding, “You may not believe that and I may not believe it, but it’s a useful hypocrisy.”

In its terms, In the Loop hits its targets with precision and accuracy. So what more did I want from it? The characters aren’t over-scaled enough to qualify as surreal cartoons, like the characters in Strangelove, except maybe for Simon and his equally foul-mouthed, bulldozing buddy, Jamie, played by Paul Higgins. If the movie had encouraged the viewer to not just enjoy Simon and Jamie but identify with them, as sacred monsters whose lack of scruples seemed liberating, so that we caught ourselves rooting for them, then it might carry more of a charge, and it might also shake you up a little, so that you understood the dangerous thrill of seeking and serving power for its own sake. But the movie stays on the outside, so that you never really identify with anyone in it–especially since one thing that it does have in common with Strangelove is that the characters who are most thoughtful and morally responsible are unappealingly ineffectual. When Jamie tortures a would-be whistle blower who finally doesn’t have the guts to stand up to him, forcing him to sully himself by participating in the creation of sham intelligence and then taunting him, “Don’t cry,” the bullying is contemptible but the victim so pathetic that he almost seems to have it coming. The scene isn’t funny, and maybe it isn’t meant to be funny, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s meant to seem as queasy as it feels. (The movie also includes a Washington staffer, played by Anna Chlumsky–the title character of the My Girl movies, all grown up–who made the mistake of writing a report that honestly lays out the flaws in the administration’s war plan and who is coming to the realization that she may have destroyed her career, and the most affecting moment in the film comes when she quietly drifts over to the dark side.)

In the Loop could use some of the satirical hyperbole that Dustin Hoffman’s parody of Robert Evans brought to Wag the Dog; without it, the movie doesn’t leave you with much beyond admiration for its ruthlessness and the simple accuracy of its take on how spin works. Although it’s clearly about the Iraq War, the movie never references Bush or Tony Blair by name, and there’s no discussion of the crackpot theories of the neocons. It’s all very abstract, a graduate seminar in the misuse of language married to a demonstration of the way that the unprincipled and ambitious roll over the sensitive and the gutless. (The war boosters are devoid of passion for anything beyond career advancement, though ideas as bad as invading Iraq don’t happen in an emotion-free environment. Though it might seem that way to future historians, the people who insisted that the correct response to a terrorist attack organized and executed by a bunch of Saudis was to overthrow a foreign government with no connection to the attack didn’t pick Iraq by throwing darts at a map.) After it was over, I found myself remembering David Gregory and Judith Miller and all the “journalists” who have angrily responded to complaints about the way the media failed to properly examine the build-up to the war by saying that it’s not a reporter’s job to do anything but read an administration’s press releases into the cameras. In the Loop demonstrates that an accurate description of how the war was sold is better left to comedians than journalists, which, granted, is a pretty good joke. But it’s too bad that the filmmakers decided to leave wild exaggeration and surreal fantasy to the journalists who told us about how the heroic George W. Bush and his Vulcans brain masters would protect us from Islamofascism and bring democracy to the Mideast by invading a secular dictatorship and making the great and beloved Ahmed Chalabi the king of all he surveyed.

–Phil Nugent