Film Review: Political satire at its edgy best in 'Loop'

Nicola Dove/IFC Films

Mimi Kennedy is an Assistant Secretary of State and James Gandolfini is a general in "In the Loop."

A BBC Films production, "In the Loop" is a relentlessly foul-mouthed political satire about an obscene process: the fabrication of a phony case for war to justify U.S. and British plans to invade the Middle East.

Nicola Dove/IFC Films

Mimi Kennedy is an Assistant Secretary of State and James Gandolfini is a general in "In the Loop."

Set almost entirely within corridors of power on both sides of the Atlantic, the movie drops the viewer inside a dense, dark maze where anti-war Theseuses and pro-war Minotaurs in tailored suits and military uniforms use words as weapons: Their arsenal includes paint-blisteringly filthy insults and -- more effective -- misleadingly massaged "facts."

In a scene that should chill lovers of truth as well as journalists, hawkish State Department neocon Linton Barwick (David Rasche) orders an underling to rewrite the official public record of the minutes of an important meeting, to eliminate dissent. "They should not be a reductive record of what happened to have been said," he says of the minutes, "but they should be a more full record of what was intended to have been said. I think that's the more accurate version."

Witty and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, "In the Loop" is an expansion of a BBC TV series called "The Thick of It," and as directed by series creator Armando Iannucci, it does resemble a slick television production. The film's success is due to the writing and the performances of the ensemble cast (including James Gandolfini as a rationalist general), not to its impersonal visuals: "In the Loop" offers yet another example of the "edgy" yet already whiskery faux-documentary style that is perhaps most familiar to fans of "The Office." The Bush-era themes also reduce the movie's impact; "Loop" seems to be spoofing something that's already happened, even if its Strangelovian portrayal of Anglo-American politics is as relevant as ever.

Fortunately, the cast is outstanding. The film's hero, if that's the right word, is a modest British minister who becomes a pawn in the rush to war when his offhand comment that conflict is "unforeseeable" is inflated into a media cause célèbre; he's played by Tom Hollander, best known for his role as the pirate-hating East India Trading Co. official in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films. The chief scene-stealer, however, is Peter Capaldi as the prime minister's aggressively unpleasant communications director, a scarecrow-like career assassin who seems to thrive, like a vampire on blood, on the sadistic thrill of humiliating his victims with violent threats and ugly insults.

"In the Loop" is exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss, 529-2394

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