‘SATIRE is what closes on Saturday night,” George S. Kaufman famously joked, though if the famed playwright were alive today, he might add it’s also available on IFC’s on-demand cable network.
“In the Loop” is certainly the smartest and funniest movie inspired by the Iraq war. The spinoff from the BBC series “The Thick of It” centers on the British prime minister’s foul-mouthed chief spokesman, brilliantly played by a Scottish actor named Peter Capaldi.
In series creator Armando Iannucci’s movie, the full towering disdain of Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker is turned on Tom Hollander’s Simon Foster, the UK’s dim secretary of international development.
Asked about a never-specified conflict in the Middle East during a televised interview, Foster brightly opines that “war is unforeseeable,” whatever that means.
That’s enough to turn the witless Foster into a political football for American officials debating an invasion. And things only get worse when the hapless Brit has another bout of foot-in-mouth disease, nattering on about “climbing the mountain of conflict.”
As Tucker fumes about him as a “Nazi Julie Andrews,” Foster is dispatched to Washington, where he is courted by a hawkish State Department official (David Rasche) who uses a hand grenade as a paperweight.
Foster also attracts the attention of another American diplomat (Mimi Kennedy), who is conspiring with her ex-boyfriend, a dovish Pentagon general (James Gandolfini, very funny), to stop the impending invasion.
When Gandolfini isn’t calculating troop levels on a children’s toy, Foster and his young assistant (Chris Addison) are creating international havoc, leaking classified documents and disclosing the existence of a secret war committee.
By this point, Tucker has also turned up in Washington, where he memorably verbally abuses a 22-year-old deputy assistant secretary at the White House who has been assigned to obstruct his mission.
Which is what, exactly? That’s not really clear, but the occasionally foggy narrative — and the TV-like visuals — are entirely forgivable in any movie as uproarious as this one.
It even has a cameo by Steve Coogan as one of the hapless Foster’s disgruntled constituents.
Capaldi’s poetically obscene rants have reportedly made him a celebrity across the pond. “In the Loop” is going to create a lot of new fans here, especially if they hear his remark about Jane Austen and horse genitals.
IN THE LOOP Spin cycle. Running time: 106 minutes. Not rated (graphic obscenity). At the IFC Center and the Lincoln Square.