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Set primarily in an opulent luxury hotel recently requisitioned to serve as the headquarters of a corrupt Central European chancellor, Will Tracy’s HBO miniseries The regime brings the same insight and sophistication as his 2022 film to banana republics The menu brought to the world of contemporary gastronomy, that is, not much. Kate Winslet does her best as The Imaginary Nation’s Elena Vernham, a neurotic hypochondriac whose delusions can have real and destabilizing, even deadly, results. But the show is no match for her vigor or her inventiveness.
It doesn’t help that, opening with a mousy Andrea Riseborough rushing up a marble staircase, The regime It immediately begs a comparison with Armando Iannucci’s work: consider it like a diet. Stalin’s death. Tracy may be leaving Successionbut his latest work has more in common with the one created by Iannucci. veep (including executive producer Frank Rich). The notable difference here is that Elena, unlike the ineffectual Selina Meyer, has the power to subject an entire country to her narcissistic whims. There’s no evidence of the toxic mold she’s convinced has spread throughout the palace, but construction crews are destroying it anyway, while her council of terrified advisors are made to believe they’re also choking on it.
Winslet has rarely played a role so intensely comedic, but she plays it with gusto, pursing her lips in a diagonal cut when Elena is confused or upset. The early episodes, when the action is largely confined to the palace itself, play out mostly as a frenetic farce, with anxious officials, including Elena’s husband Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne), moving back and forth as they try to bring carry out your wishes without attracting your attention. (At one point, the building is filled with bowls of steaming potatoes, as Elena has determined that the cure for her ailment is to “unlock the ancient power of the potato.”) But there is a hint of bloodshed in the new member. from his entourage, a soldier named Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts). The fact that he is known as “the Butcher” for his involvement in the massacre of a group of striking coal miners does not faze Elena; in fact, he specifically requested “a guy from Site 5.”
Herbert’s initial tasks are harmless, mainly scanning rooms for excess moisture so Elena knows if it’s safe to enter, but he quickly positions himself in a position of true power. Although Elena would rather die than breathe the same air as them, she is obsessed with sustaining the hearts of the working poor of her country, those whom she, in her periodic radio speeches, refers to as “my loves.” She finds in Herbert a particularly attractive specimen of the common man, one whose preference for actions (especially violent ones) over words creates an exciting contrast to the mealy-mouthed members of his cabinet. They, he confesses in his upper-class accent, don’t understand “common idiots like us.”
Elena believes that Herbert is her conduit to “what the nobodies want,” but she doesn’t like his answers, particularly those that involve returning the national assets he has appropriated. In short, “the people” validate your ability to exercise your will regardless of the subtleties of government procedure. As individuals within the scope of the word, such people have desires and demands that conflict with their aversion to any kind of supervision. He’s not much better with those he should coddle, like the American industrialists whose exploitation of the country’s natural resources fills his pockets, or the U.S. senator (Martha Plimpton) sent to gently warn him that his impulsive decisions risk destabilizing the entire society. region. Elena knows that the smartest thing to do is to cooperate with the United States, a country that, as she points out, does not hesitate to overlook the occasional massacre, as long as it serves her interests. But she is so overcome with resentment that she treats a diplomatic envoy like one of her easily intimidated subordinates, locking her in a room alone with the Butcher, whose mere presence is so threatening that she doesn’t have to make any overt threats.
The regime It gets darker along the way (there are six episodes in total), as Elena’s power becomes more unstable and the lengths she goes to to protect it become more extreme. But the satire is tempered by the series’ generic setting and the vagueness of its ideas, not to mention the way it lets global superpowers like the United States and China off the hook for supporting repressive regimes and fostering dysfunctional political climates. Winslet’s performance is so titanic, and the series so focused on her character, that it gives the impression that the sorry state of her country is primarily a function of her personality, and not the influence of political and economic forces that eclipse even her. absolute power. . It leaves us grateful that we don’t live in a country like hers, instead of feeling implicated in the role that countries like ours play in making those countries the way they are. are.