How Iannucci would have done it

I was pretty harsh on the milquetoast Fly Me to the Moon, which I thought could have used a lot more bite and a lot less earnestness.

Like, how Armando Iannucci would have done it.

I name-checked Iannucci in my review (which you can read here), specifically mentioning his projects Veep and The Death of Stalin. I mentioned the former because I haven't seen it but because I assume it's good, and the latter because I've seen it and I know it's good. I haven't liked some of Iannucci's other projects, specifically In the Loop, so I didn't mention that. But my most recent impressions of Iannucci have been good ones, first The Death of Stalin and then, to a far lesser extent, The Personal History of David Copperfield. So I guess you could say I am late in coming to appreciate Iannucci's specific brand of acidity (which, I should say, is not on display to the same extent in the latter film).

I'd been thinking it was time to see The Death of Stalin, my #18 of 2018, a second time, but something that happened on Friday night clinched it.

We were watching the third? fourth? episode of the most recent season of Only Murders in the Building, and Steve Martin's character is trying to convince his fellow castmates of Martin Short's snakebitten play to continue on with the project despite the death of the leading man (Paul Rudd). He says something about how "no one wants anyone to die," and then amends it to include welcome deaths like Hitler. And Stalin.

When the universe speaks, you should listen.

So I queued up The Death of Stalin after we finished the show, having had to look at four other streaming services before I found it on Netflix. (You'd think that's where I would have looked first, but Netflix seems a lot more biased toward new content, with even a six-year-old movie possibly struggling to make it into their offerings.)

I probably didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first time -- I remembered laughing more than I did this time -- but it definitely confirmed my sense that Iannucci could have given Fly Me to the Moon more of the tone I wanted from it.

You probably haven't seen Fly Me to the Moon yet, since it was only just released, so I won't spoil too much. I will say, though, that the trailers are a bit misleading about how much of the movie actually revolves around the faked space landing. They try to get in some good jokes about that, mostly delivered by a very Iannuccian sort of player in Jim Rash, but not as many of them land as they should. And the movie just doesn't have the courage to make many, or really any, of its characters wicked, the way they would be in an Iannucci treatment of the material.

The Death of Stalin has a lot of wicked characters, but the thing I found interesting about it is that they are wicked within the context of realism. You wouldn't think there would be much realistic in a movie that features Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, but what I like about an Iannucci movie is that it portrays politicians and others in a way a lot of historical films would not see it fit to depict them: foul-mouthed, petty, and in turns both shrewd and myopic. They certainly bumble, but they don't bumble as broadly as you might expect -- and subtle bumbling is a lot funnier than broad bumbling.

A movie starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson could probably never afford to have done that. These are big box office stars and in order to get audiences to go, the conventional wisdom seems to be to make them sympathetic. They try to go there a bit with ScarJo's character, a con woman, but they can't leave her on the Iannucci side of the audience's rooting interests. She has to be good at her core.

The real problem with Fly Me to the Moon is that it doesn't have enough content to make a 2 hour and 12 minute movie about just the faking of the moon landing, so it fills up the rest of the time on a budding romance between Tatum's and Johansson's characters and some more standard inspirational material about space flight. That stuff is never going to be as good as other movies that make it their primary focus.

But now I'm just repeating my review, which I already linked.

I guess there is no guarantee that I'd like Iannucci's version of this significantly better. I didn't care for In the Loop, after all, and not caring for In the Loop is the main reason I didn't even watch Veep.

But he at least would have given this material teeth and balls, which the milquetoast Fly Me to the Moon doesn't have.