In The Loop (2009, Dir: Armando Iannucci)

In The Loop is a farcical satire, a spin-off – or rather, an extension of – the British television comedy The Thick Of It. Directed by Armando Iannucci, co-writer of such gems as On The Hour, The Day Today, The Friday/Saturday Night Armistice and I’m Alan Partridge, the film is also written by a team of writers led by Iannucci.

The only returning character from the TV series, the Prime Minister’s ‘enforcer’ Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) is shown arriving at his Downing Street office. Tucker is a wonderful character – a destructive combination of anger, fury and swear words – and his first task of the day, to listen to a radio interview with the bumbling Secretary of State for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), sets him off for the duration of the film.

Foster, a Tim-nice-but-dim type, is an eight year-old trapped in the body of a politician, and has accidentally declared on BBC Radio 4 that war in the Middle East is ‘unforeseeable’. This blunder sparks a chain of events involving both British and American governments, with lines blurred and motives questionable throughout.

It’s very easy to get lost in Iannucci’s film – most of the principle characters are lost within their own ambitions – and there’s no such thing as plot; just one mishandled faux pas and a chain of resulting consequences. The action takes us from London to Washington DC, and just when Foster starts to get a handle on the situation, a local constituent (a nice cameo from Steve Coogan) brings him back down to earth with complaints about a council wall falling down in his mother’s back-garden.

It’s hard to tell how accurate this film is in portraying the world of politics. Obviously the back-stabbing and grandstanding is highly believable, but one wonders whether any politician in the real world would restrict himself to watching a documentary on sharks in his hotel room, reasoning that he doesn’t want the porn channel to show on the room’s billing invoice (and recent news stories in the UK would back this up).

In The Loop is therefore a strange breed – a farce that doesn’t stray too far from plausibility. At one point, when the word ‘war’ starts to be muttered by the Americans, General Miller (James Gandolfini) is taken to one side at a house party in Washington. Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy), mindful of the gaffe that has travelled across the Atlantic from Downing Street, is after some advice from the military. They retreat to a child’s bedroom for privacy, and Miller resorts to using the room’s bright pink calculator – with cartoonish sound effects – to prove how unlikely military action will be due to the low number of soldiers in the region. It’s not too far a stretch to imagine George W. Bush using such technology to order the invasion of Iraq in 2003.