In the Loop

In the Loopis a corrosive, brilliantly subversive comedy on the fractured state of our world, writes DONALD CLARKE

IT’S A modestly budgeted political satire with no real stars, inspired by a BBC4 series that was, at the height of its popularity, watched by about 23 people. It’s hasn’t really got much of a plot, all the characters are frightful, and it ends in deliberately inconclusive fashion. What’s more, following certain personnel changes in Washington and Westminster, it now looks a tad out of date. Selling this to the public might frustrate even a spinmeister like Alistair Campbell, but we’ll give it a go.

In the Loopis not quite a sequel to Armando Iannucci's magnificent The Thick of It. The savage, foul- mouthed Malcolm Tucker, a New Labour media minder with some of Campbell's nastier genes, returns to harass secretaries of state and snort at civil servants. No other characters remain from the series.

Tom Hollander plays Simon Foster, a hapless minister who dares (momentarily) to think for himself. Gina McKee also makes a first appearance on the team. Rather confusingly, Chris Addison returns as a junior advisor, but he is playing a different, slightly nastier junior advisor to the one he played in The Thick of It.

Foster triggers disaster when he makes the terrible mistake of describing war as “unforeseeable”. This being the sort of word that can mean whatever the press wants it to mean, Tucker flies into a trademark rage that threatens to sear flesh from the minister’s bones. A British delegation is about to be welcomed in (a conspicuously pre-Obama) Washington, so it is a particularly bad time to drift off-message.

Like the Are You Being Served? movie, In the Loopis one of those TV spin-offs that takes its characters on holiday. Upon arriving in the US, the team, still star-struck and jet-lagged, becomes part of a hapless drunken stumble towards an unnecessary war.

More of a believer in cock-ups than conspiracies, Iannucci once again demonstrates how in contemporary politics it is incompetence, rather than malevolence, that inspires the ugliest calamities.

You could, indeed, argue that the film has arrived somewhat too late. It's been a while since Campbell stalked the corridors of Labour HQ, and the atmosphere in Washington – if not the capital's hidden mechanism – has changed significantly over the past three months. Recent feature-length specials of The Thick of Ithave already begun to concern themselves with Tory image- minders.

Mind you, the film contains an accidental moment of topicality when Hollander and his aides, more cautious than the real British Home Secretary’s loved ones, worry about a blue movie turning up on their expenses claim. This week’s shenanigans surrounding Damian McBride, a sort of mini- Campbell, show that dirty tricks are still afoot.

Anyway, this hilarious film, shot with jittery cameras and overlapping dialogue, is mostly concerned with ancient, unchangeable truths of political life. The way in which the great issues of the age get pushed aside by the need to dampen personal rivalries reminds us that all politics are office politics.

A subplot that finds Foster becoming distracted by a barmy constituent (Steve Coogan) and his concerns over a precarious wall highlights the downside of the parliamentary system. Every scene pushes home the terrifying intelligence that the people in charge may be no brighter than you, me or the budgie.

This is important stuff, but In the Loop is most remarkable for its ability to make profane poetry out of the foulest language. The film may not be (to use a slippery term) all that cinematic. The dialogue is, however, so innovative in its quasi-Jacobean savagery that it deserves to be declaimed in a space the size of your average movie house. It’s as funny as watching a pig stick its **** up a donkey’s ****

IN THE LOOP Directed by Armando Iannucci. Starring Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini, Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky 15A cert, lim release, 106 min ****

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