Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut
Bob Ellis on In The Loop and Invictus.
Anyone who’s hung round political backrooms (like me) will recognise the terrifying truth of In The Loop, whose random screaming matches, moral panic, hectic hourly backflips, self-disgust and persistent paranoid suspense form the lifestyle of all who battle the twenty-four hour news cycle and the post-Christian water-boarding Chicken Little chaos of the modern world. How to stop a needless war and still keep my job? How to talk for one more minute to this dumb and potent American without breaking his nose with a chair?
It is one of the five or six funniest films in English and needs to be seen, not least for James Gandolfini’s American general attacking the office furniture and speaking of eating live puppies, and David Rasche’s take on Rumsfeld, a micromanaging bloodthirsty psychopath who abhors bad language, and Mimi Kennedy’s lusty bewrinkled variant on Hillary Clinton, whose teeth keep bleeding in moments of stress, all of whom show Americans have irony too.
But the English (and Scottish) are narrowly, I think, the more rib-splitting. Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) the munchkin Minister caught improvising on camera and causing, perhaps, world war; Toby Wright (Chris Addison) the woolly young aide caught schtupping in Washington and feebly informing his English girlfriend it was ‘to stop this awful war’; Judy Molloy (Gina McKee) the tall cool appointments manager and, of course, the two Scotsmen.
