Karina on SpoutBlog

Now as much as ever, Hollywood comedy is heavily preoccupied with pandering to the median. Something like Bruno is clearly designed to make the viewer feel good about their own brain power and education — each laugh is equivalent to an “I’m smart enough to behave better than that” statement, whether it’s “I’m smart enough to not hate gay people” or “I’m smart enough to not get suckered by Sacha Baron Cohen in the first place.” And nobody in the audience of a Judd Apatow film has to work very hard to get the jokes in it, although inevitably it’s suggested that most or all of the protagonists on screen weren’t gifted with the same innate intelligence. So the first thing that marks In The Loop as a break from the norm is its refusal to flatter the viewer’s intelligence; the second, is the way the film forces them to use it.

Written and directed by Armando Iannucci, a British TV comedy veteran whose credits include Steve Coogan’s faux chat show breakout Knowing Me Knowing You and Loop forerunner The Thick of It, Loop is a satire of modern politics by way of a procedural critique of the rhetoric that animates it. The action starts in London, where Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a small-time cabinet minister with a Palin-esque way with a soundbite, gives one interview vaguely opposing an impending US/British co-invasion of an unnamed Middle Eastern territory before making another statement vaguely supporting it. The never-seen Prime Minister’s aggressively profane Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, reprising his role from Thick) tries at first to contain Foster’s self-possessed bumbling, but when liberal American cabinet secretary Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) folds Foster’s first statement into her case for peace, Tucker sets a plan in motion using the unwitting Foster as a crowbar to get inside the US war room. The web is tangled considerably by the arrival of Foster’s new aide Toby (Chris Addison). Initially out of his element under Tucker’s Rahm-reminiscent tyranny (he comes from the Department of Agriculture, where “people tend to not get so sweary about wheat”), Toby’s ambitious plundering of his connections (including Clarke’s bright young assistant, played by Anna Chlumsky) creates a couple of lucky breaks that turn into a number of nightmares.
Loop unfolds in the author-less mock-verite style most often asociated with The Office, but the film’s lack of talking head confessionals and camera-conscious smirking is not the only thing that muddies up the comparison. The Office and its cultural cousins can be naturally aligned with several strains of this decade’s fine art cinema, thanks to the common use of the awkward pause as a fundamental building block. There are no pauses in In the Loop, awkward or otherwise. The film comes out of the gate at a breakneck pace and never lets up, packing jokes within jokes within cultural references (my favorite: Love Actually used as a derogatory nickname), forcing the viewer to fall into its accelerated meter quickly or never catch up. Even the few moments that find characters in honestly muted contemplation are spiked with off-hand punchlines, such as when the dovish general played by James Gandolfini plaintively explains his opposition to war: ”Once you’ve been there, once you’ve seen it, you never want to go back unless you have to. It’s like France.” (I’m also partial to the way Clarke greets a prickish young aide wandering aimlessly around the office: “Hanging, Chad?”)
In the Loop assumes the viewer will have a general familiarity with the circumstances of the run up to the war in Iraq (the opposing personalities within the US State department, the role of questionable British intelligence in a United Nations presentation with all the ethical integrity of a press release), but it’s careful to avoid resembling reality so closely as to demand engagement on an ideological level. This is not a film about the rights and wrongs of actual US/UK war policy; it’s not really a film about policy specifics at all, except for where it needs to solidify details in order to better wring comedy out of the concept of strong people using weaker ones to puff up their own agendas. Its ultimate satirical statement is not about ethics, evidence or arguments, but the manner in which the modern political machine works to obliterate all of the above to make way for the manipulation of reality. It is not the first film to suggest that Washington’s process of manufacturing narratives has something in common with Hollywood.
“Hollywood” is something which In The Loop itself emphatically is not, although for a great portion of its running time, until late in the game when the accumulated pieces of Iannucci’s project click into place, the viewing experience is, surprisingly, incredibly light. A scene depicting a crucial war comittee meeting is given maybe a quarter of the screen time as a number of scenes of various British people running around DC, trying to find the meeting without actually having to admit to any Americans that they don’t know where it is. This kind of thing is where Iannucci’s television roots unavoidably show. Certainly, the visual presentation of In the Loop is almost defiantly non-cinematic; certainly, Iannucci seems to be having the most fun when he’s stretching away from his story, drawing his characters through the way they speak. Consequently, it’s hard to see how this material, seemingly begging for the long-form possibilities of an English-length series, benefits from being constrained to the length of a feature film. Call it a backhanded compliment: In The Loop is a very funny film that plays like great TV.