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In the Loop
That old adage “language is power” has rarely felt truer or sounded funnier than in Armando Iannucci’s scabrous political satire In the Loop. When wielded by this turbo-charged comedy’s band of schemers, strivers, and egotists, words become the most deadly and hysterical of weapons. They possess the power to deflate egos, hobble careers, and even push two countries into a suspect and politically expedient war. Mostly, though, they inspire lengthy spasms of laughter.
In the Loop is a fictionalized (if thinly-veiled) account of the build-up to the War in Iraq within both the American and British governments: a process the film imagines as driven almost entirely by petty turf wars and public-relations flubs. More specifically, it chronicles with stinging wit how government power players use words to massage facts and bully opponents into going along with a tenuous military excursion. Linguistic issues spring to the fore almost immediately, when the hapless Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the British Secretary of State for International Development, inadvertently signals support for a war with an unspecified Middle Eastern region when he tells the media that such conflict is “unforeseeable.” Fearing that Foster’s ambiguous phrasing will tie the British government to supporting the Americans’ percolating war plans, the Prime Minister’s hard-charging spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), steps in. He sends Foster and his ambitious new advisor Toby (Chris Addison) to Washington to clear the air, but Foster soon finds himself being used by various American officials—including the dovish assistant secretary of diplomacy (Mimi Kennedy) and the hawkish State Department head (David Rasche)—in the growing debate over whether to deploy troops. Tensions build and alliances shift as a crucial United Nations vote on the impending war looms.
Screenwriters Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, and Tony Roche have a finely-attuned ear to the doublespeak and Orwellian turns of phrase used by politicians to justify logically-bankrupt but personally-beneficial political action. (One character rationalizes an adulterous one-night stand as a means of averting international crisis.) In the Loop is at its hysterical best, though, when characters turn on one another, unleashing savage waves of invective to gain leverage in a Darwinian political climate. As with David Mamet’s profane con artists and salesmen, language becomes a method of survival and a means of showcasing masculine braggadocio. The cast—which also includes James Gandolfini as a peace-leaning Pentagon general—is note-perfect, but Capaldi must be singled out for his savagely funny embodiment of this bilious worldview. We feel how much pleasure Capaldi’s Tucker takes in molding his wicked thoughts into obscenity-laced insults of such coiled aggression and finely-honed wit.
In the Loop’s docudrama style (sudden zooms and pans, minimal non-diegetic score) frames the film’s at-times outrageous content as observed action rooted in reality. In doing so, Iannucci never allows us to forget the incompetence and arrogance that drove the real-life march to Iraq. Nevertheless, he keeps things moving at a relentless clip, letting the audience tap into the frenzied—and skewered—logic that drove those decisions. By the end, I’ll be damned if I didn’t find myself completely wrapped up in the characters’ relentless wheeling and dealing, even as I laughed—and gasped—at the brazenness of their deceptions. Like all great satirists, Iannucci burrows deep into his subject, if only to better expose the rot he finds at its center.
Matt Connolly
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