The New Film Skewering Blair and Bush

Larry Busacca / Getty Images With In the Loop, British director Armando Iannucci has created the decade’s defining political critique. He spoke with The Daily Beast about spinning the news, journalist intimidation, and channeling Rumsfeld.

If a political era is lucky, the most virulent specimens of the most soul-deadening viruses of the day get the lethal injection of brilliant satire they deserve.

The think tank theoreticians of thermonuclear war got theirs with Dr. Strangelove, the careless, grandiose masters of the universe got theirs with The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the semantically gymnastic spinmeisters of the ‘90s got theirs with Wag the Dog. The unfortunate fact that In the Loop chugs in a couple years late, in U.S. theaters July 24, should not obscure the news that with this film, director Armando Iannucci gives the bullies of the Bush and Blair administrations the thrashing they deserve.

Neither Bush nor Blair—nor any high-office holder, for that matter—is mentioned in In the Loop; all the action takes place at some unidentified near-present under some unidentified regimes. But the capitals of Washington and London are clear enough, and so are the echoes of fudgy facts presented during the runup to the Iraq war to the United Nations and Congress and Parliament, and so is the attitude of the subalterns whose vanities, pretentions, ambitions, anxieties, and machinations help unleash the havoc. “The political buildup to the invasion of Iraq was both terribly tragic and farcical,” said Iannucci in an interview with The Daily Beast, “but that was a story I wanted to tell, the story of people engaged in office politics whose small dreams of empire-building have enormous consequences.”

The chief agents in the welter of dysfunctions that lead to war are the bullies, the ones who trample doubt and disagreement. Most extravagant among them is Malcolm Foster (Peter Capaldi), the prime minister’s scowling, snarling, vulpine director of communications, who protects the government’s message from prying journalists and careless-tongued officials. This he accomplishes like an oratorically gifted Luca Brasi by muscling transgressors with arias of insult. “You may have heard him say 'unforeseeable,’ but he did not say that, and that is a fact,’” we hear Malcolm early in the film barking on the phone to an editor, talking about a cabinet minister who did, in fact, use that wan word about a possibly pending Mideast conflict. “OK, OK, print 'unforeseeable.’ See what happens when I tell your wife about you and Angela Heaney at the Blackpool Conference. What would be best: an email or a phone call or what? Hey, I could write it on a cake with those little silver balls: 'Your hack husband betrayed you on October 4th, and congratulations on the new baby!’ Yeah, maybe it’s better to spike it.”

And that’s just a taste of the merry invective, much of it more profane, that follows. Malcolm smites hapless ministers, earnest civil servants, ambitious underlings, and his charges hip and thigh. Iannucci says he based Malcolm a bit on Blair spokesman Alastair Campbell and a bit on the Labor Party’s so-called Prince of Darkness Peter Mandelson, as well as "Downing Street’s hordes of anonymous enforcers, as they’re known, who defend their belief that events are controlled by how they’re perceived in the media."