On message

18 April 2009

In the Loop
15, Nationwide

Although, like the BBC TV series, it’s shot on two cameras so actors can improvise and move at breakneck speed, here the action goes beyond Whitehall to Washington in the lead-up to a proposed US/UK-led war against some Middle Eastern country. (Iraq is never mentioned, and doesn‘t have to be. This is about two countries that happen to fancy a war, whatever.) The plot kicks off when Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a hapless British minister in some backwater department, inadvertently backs the war on prime-time television, so bringing him to the attention of the mad American neocons and a pacifist General in the big, big shape of James Gandolfini who, at one point, uses a child’s binging, boinging My First Laptop to explain why America doesn’t have the forces for this conflict. ‘Twelve thousand is the number that we could send and we’d expect casualties of around...[boing, bing]...12,000. See, you have to have some troops left at the end otherwise it kind of looks as if you have lost.’ This is savage absurdity on a par with the war room scenes in Dr Strangelove, surely.

The performances are outstanding, and there are many laugh-out-loud moments as confirmed by the fact that I laughed out loud. (Me! The woman whose career has almost entirely been based on bad-humoured sneering!) I particularly, for example, enjoyed Foster’s account of what it’s like to do a constituency surgery — ‘It’s like being Simon Cowell without the ability to say: “F*** off, you’re mental”’ — and the brilliant, skewering of government double talk. ‘Whether it happened or not,’ Tucker hisses at one stage, ‘it’s still true.’

This is great work or, as Campbell puts it, ‘This is the must-see movie of the year.’ He also added, ‘It may even be the must-see movie of the decade.’ Actually, he didn’t say either, but it’s Wednesday tomorrow so I thought I’d get in as much doctored intelligence as I could before I have to switch to smearing. I’m thinking David Cameron has an embarrassing illness and drinks juice straight from the carton, but I haven’t fully made my mind up yet.