In the Loop

City Paper Grade: A-

by Sam Adams

An outgrowth of the brilliant British TV series The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's white-hot satire In the Loop both mocks and laments the diseased political culture that pushes the U.K. and the U.S. toward an unnecessary war against a Middle Eastern country. The movie never names names, but that hardly softens its sting. The environment in which petty maneuvering takes precedence over sound practice, even in what ought to be the direst of times, is perfectly recognizable to anyone who's picked up a newspaper in the last eight years.

Peter Capaldi, best known for his role as a floppy-armed lawyer in Local Hero, reprises his Thick of It role as Malcolm Tucker, the volcanic spin doctor whose Scots-accented profanities are as fearsome as they are inventive. A handful of other cast members reprise their roles, if not their characters — Chris Addison plays a hapless minister's aide named Toby, instead of a hapless aide named Olly — but the film adds an American delegation, including James Gandolfini as a general reluctant to join the march to war and David Rasche as a Rumsfeldian State Department head for whom cuss words are more profane than massaging intelligence reports. All it takes is a stray remark by Tom Hollander's thick-headed minister — that the likelihood of war is "unforeseeable" — to start the wheels turning so fast that they can't be stopped.

Shot in a chaotic, handheld style, In the Loop is The West Wing turned inside-out, a workplace sitcom in which rather than rising above petty disagreements for the sake of God and country, the squabbling factions are only encouraged by the heightened stakes of their combat. The movie has its share of zingers: Gandolfini describes war as a place so horrible, "once you've been there, you never want to go again; it's like France." But at its heart is a pitch-black and utterly true-to-life portrait of the modern political era. Those who criticize the movie for being apolitical miss the point. It's anti-political, a cry of despair framed as a dark and bitter laugh.