Highly Gifted Toddlers and Egg Men

Good satire is incredibly difficult to pull off. The writer is walking that tightrope between being relevant and being too goofy. The best satires are the ones that are able to bite back at institutions and the established status quo while revealing their hypocrisies and their ability to use dual personalities when it's convenient for them. Bad satire only makes you laugh at how ridiculous some people and groups are. Well made satire makes you laugh while instilling a sense of fear when you realize how right it is and how wrong it is that those people are in charge.

Armando Iannucci's 2009 film In The Loop walks that tightrope with admirable balance. It revolves around the chaos a British government minister, played with innocent clueless-ness by Tom Hollander, causes when he says in a radio interview that war in the Middle East is unforeseeable. This slip of the tongue sets off his public relations specialist Malcolm Tucker on a rampage of profanities and insults that would make David Mamet and Oliver Wilde blush. Tucker now has to try to salvage the situation and not let certain American interests use it as an excuse for war. Everything snowballs and pulls in tons of inept and two-faced characters. Each one with their own agenda. It's in this quagmire that Iannucci lets his characters loose with their beautiful and endlessly hilarious use of the King's English.

This movie is going to be remembered forever by those who are fans of the art of intelligent and vulgar insults. It's a movie that knows that profanity for the sake of profanity stops being funny after a while and is in no way smart. It understands that swears are to be used as an added kick to an insult and not just the insult itself.

I can't pick out one single supporting performance to shine a light on because they are all way too funny. James Gandolfini as a peace loving hypocritical general is a calm but intimidating presence, even when he's lost during a lunch party. Steve Coogan pops in as a resident of Hollander's village who is increasingly mad about a crumbling wall in his mother's backyard. A wall that is no way subtle in it's metaphor for the war. The always reliable David Rasche plays the assistant Secretary of State. A man who is the typical Republican bureaucrat and who knows all about the art of spin and who carries an easily understandable hatred for David O. Russell's pretentious two hour metaphysical masturbatory session I Heart Huckabee's. A movie that I recommend to you if you're on the fence about committing suicide. It'll help get you there.

The movie does hit some stumbling blocks when it comes to a lack of focus. It bounces off a few too many characters and as such loses it's forward momentum about half way through. That's not to say it's boring, it's the polar opposite of boring. It just needed a more controlled sense of order in it's plot's intentions. But the movie is one that I feel will improve upon future viewings and one that I will be quoting for years to come. Hell, I already am quoting it.