Capaldi and Gandolfini have it out in In The Loop

There’s a scene in In The Loop in which the “crossest man in Scotland” is introduced. Up until then you can be forgiven for thinking that you have been spending most of the film with that very man, Malcolm Tucker, a fixer with a penchant for four letter words that would make Deadwood’s Al Swearingen blush. Sure enough though, the man in question is revealed and it’s one of the film’s many insights that behind every angry man is a smaller, even angrier man waiting in the wings.

In The Loop is an unsparing farce, a thinly veiled account of the run-up to the Iraq war from the vantage point of government bureaucracy’s nether regions.  The “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain is revealed to be nothing so much as that between a ‘master race of toddlers” and the frustrated parents they’ve subjugated.

Along the way there are some wonderfully visceral one-liners and plenty of inter-office blood drawn, and some outstanding performances by Peter Capaldi as the aforementioned Tucker, James Gandolfini as a cautious American General, Anna Chlumsky who may have said too much, too insightfully for her career’s own good, and Mimi Kennedy as her dentally-fixated boss.

Saying too much and to whom is a constant theme running through In The Loop, as a casual observation by Tom Hollander as a low-level cabinet minister leads to an escalating series of consequences. Hollander is excellent in showing how this man is both intelligent and naive, pumped up by the attention and fearful of the fallout.

This is a brutally funny movie that would be ridiculous were it not so sadly close to the truth. David Rasche as a State Department operative has several wonderful scenes in which he deconstructs facts to create the version of events he would like to be true, another recurring motif. It’s the kind of parsing the Bush administration dealt out as a matter of course.

In The Loop is shot in appropriate pseudo-docu style, a look that is becoming a bit clichéd but works perfectly in this context. The rapid-fire screenplay and performances make everything zing like a screwball comedy up until the inevitable end. Unlike Bringing Up Baby the uptight professor here is the British government and the nutty heiress is the United States and when they get together the consequences are very bad indeed.

This is a spinoff of a BBC series The Thick of It which I haven’t seen but will be sure to seek out solely based on sharing writer/director Armando Iannucci and the openly  festering Malcolm Tucker as a character.

Here’s the crossest man in Scotland: