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Given how some critics have compared this satire of the lead-up to the Iraq war with Dr. Strangelove, perhaps it should have been subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the F-Bomb.”  In the post-Soviet world, State Department officials have to deal with a new kind of munitions gap—the British are winning the four-letter arms race.  Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other powers that be lurk far off-screen pulling the strings, already having decided that America and Britain would march to war.  The task of legitimizing this decision on both sides of the pond is left to incompetent bureaucrats and their baby-faced overachieving twenty-something assistants.  The rules of the game are simple: advance your career as much as possible by speaking the party line in the right time, the right place, and the right way.  If you have difficulty doing this, blame other people and barrage them with witty arrangements of expletives.

The camera work must have been entrusted to a hyperactive child, and, at least for the first few minutes (which feel much longer), the audience is treated like one.  Mommy, is this the zoom button?  Wow!  I can zoom in, and out, and back in again, and really fast!  Gee, that man (British minister of international development Simon Foster, played by Tom Hollander) sure looks angry.  I’ll follow him back to his office!  It’s so boring holding the camera in one place.  I can look from this side, and that side, and that other side too!  This other man in the office (civil servant Malcom Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi) says a lot of naughty things that make me laugh really loud!  In a sense it’s a gift to be able to laugh loudly whenever any combination of a certain set of seven words is said.  Like other natural gifts, it’s much more considerate to enjoy it at home than in the movie theater.

The lingua franca between the two countries divided by a common language seems to be the one-liner.  Some are clever, some are mediocre, and many are threats of sexual violence delivered in a Scottish accent.  Delivering the one-liners is a small army of one-dimensional characters.  Unfortunately, none of them is played by Peter Sellers.  Simon was born with his foot in his mouth, and his young press secretary Toby (Chris Addison) is charged with fixing his reputation during their trip to Washington.  But Toby’s American old flame Liza (Anna Chlumsky) lives in Washington, and he’s under the delusion that “what happens in Washington stays in Washington.”  Liza seems to be the only person in the State Department who thinks the war’s a bad idea, who convinces her helpless boss Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) to advocate for peace, along with a fat, sensitive general (James Gandolfini) whose war-mongering rival is Linton Barwick (David Rasche), whose aide is—enough already, if you want to know who he is, go to IMDB.  And there’s a prim and proper Oxbridge man (Chris Langham) and an attractive woman (Gina Mckee) thrown into bit roles just for kicks.

The movie tries as hard as it can to be zany with its quirky characters, speed-talking, quick takes, and calm, classical score that brings these features into relief.  Alas, fast-talking alone does not zaniness make.  The dialogue between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night is both razor-sharp and hilarious, but it wouldn’t work without images like the hitchhiking and the destruction of the walls of Jericho.  In The Loop gives us far too few memorable images, but they’re fairly well done.  The fat general calculating troop concentrations in a little girl’s room using her oversized pink talking calculator.  The Capitol Hill staffers burning off steam in a mosh pit.  The dissatisfied constituents in an ancient gym and a collapsing brick wall which, of all possible things, brings about Simon’s political ruin.

This movie falls short even in its strong suit of one-liners.  Dr. Strangelove gives us the timeless exclamation of, “You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”  When the Meditation Room at U.N. Headquarters is overtaken by profanity warfare, the British ambassador briefly spoils the fun by reminding the belligerents of the room’s intended purpose.  But then Malcom’s filthy mouth opens yet again.

-Robert Henderson

I think that this film isn’t meant to just be ‘a funny comedy’. It is more than that; a black comedy. I enjoyed how the film works as a commentary of modern governments – the spin and manipulation. In that respect it can’t really be faulted in my eyes. Our blog might explain my viewpoint better: http://theysaidreeladvice.blogspot.com/2010/02/in-loop-directed-by-armando-iannuchi.html

Comment by He said, She said 02.18.10 @ 11:50 am