"In the Loop": A truer-than-true fictional film about war

Baghdad is never mentioned. The American president and British prime minister stay entirely off-screen. And no parliamentary or congressional sessions figure in the action.

Yet "In the Loop" — a motor-mouthed and epithet-strewn Anglo-American comedy — comes as close as any sobering news report to explaining how the U.S. steered itself into Iraq, with the U.K. at its heels.

The film by Armando Iannucci, director of British television's political satire "The Thick of It," feels like the "Dr. Strangelove" of the Iraq War era. It has a stellar cast of British actors (Tom Hollander, Peter Capaldi, Steve Coogan) and American actors (James Gandolfini, David Rasche, Mimi Kennedy) whose improv skills and pure performing chops keep the jittery, talk-filled action going for close to two hours.

I talked with Kennedy, co-star of "Dharma and Greg," at the Seattle International Film Festival, where "In the Loop" was the opening night film. The actress, who plays Karen Clarke, a second-tier State Department official trying to put the brakes on the march toward invasion, was savvy and articulate.

Q: You and your fellow actors look like you're having the time of your lives. What was the atmosphere like on-set?

It was a mutual admiration society between the British and the American actors. ... We had all suffered the consequences of this behavior. So we were the lucky court fools who got to put on their jingle caps and make fun of the king.

Q: There are four identified screenplay writers for the movie — all of them Brits. How did they get the American jargon and slang so right?

They did a lot of interviews with staffers and people in Washington. Armando and the other writers ... are very interested in politics and the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, so they were following events. ... When you see a larger-than-life tragedy unfolding, it makes you want to learn, of course, why, how, who, what and where. So here you have these British political satirists focusing on the American character with a new curiosity born of pity and terror. The stuff of tragedy — they turned it into comedy.

Q: Were there particular American politicians you drew on for your role?

All I did was put my head into a State Department job and behave accordingly — because I'm old enough now to have that kind of power, as a woman. I'm of the feminist generation. I'm the chair of the Progressive Democrats of America, and I've been to Capitol Hill. I know the corridors of power — let's put it that way. ... So it was easy for me to be Karen Clarke. Q: Karen is admirable in many ways and she has good instincts, especially in trying to stem the rush to war. But she's also kind of a wreck.

She's abused and abusive. And that's being a woman, that's having fought your way up as a woman in the corridors of power, in my generation. You took a lot of abuse. ... As an actress I struggled in New York City and I did a lot of secretarial jobs, and I had a boss — you had to get her dry cleaning, you had to get her cheesecake made out of cottage cheese because she was hypoglycemic. The high-maintenance boss.

Q: Was that in the script or was that what you brought to the character?

hat was in the script. But I glommed onto that because it made total sense. Karen's increasing irritability and sense of powerlessness [are] absolutely taken out on her assistant.

Q: What were the guidelines in sticking to and departing from reality? It's a bit of a parallel universe, yet there aren't exact correlations.

Exactly. ... That's the genius of this film. Naming individual personalities and blaming them is a distraction from the real condition that allows wars to be popularized and sold.

Q: You don't mention Iraq either. Was that always the rule?

Yeah. We weren't mentioning anything. Armando wanted a universal film about the behavior of people who are not at the top of the power pyramid.

Q: There's a thesis at work in the film that the ministers are at the mercy of their handlers. Did the input for that come from real-life politicians?

I don't know what Armando actually got from anybody. But he's being told that stuff that he thought he made up did happen.

Q: What about the business of devising the blandest possible name for the war committee so no outsiders will know it's a war committee? Did that come out of the script or was that improv?

The script. I improvised the way that Karen Clarke would behave, but I didn't improvise much of what Karen Clarke said, because I thought Armando nailed it.

Q: What were the biggest differences between working in television and working on this film?

In television you shoot in little bites and scraps. Armando would shoot whole scenes, and you were free to go where you want to go and improvise within a general scheme. In television — American television comedy — there's ... how do I say this diplomatically? It's more vaudevillian. This film delights because of a sense of verisimilitude, which plays up the insanity of what's going on.

Q: Was it intimidating to play opposite James Gandolfini?

You know — there's something about James Gandolfini that's so real that I felt like he and I went to Catholic school together, and we were just having a reunion. I admire his work.

Q: Seeing this film makes me realize that the U.S. film scene has been satire-deprived lately. Did it take the Brits to come in and whip us into shape?

It dawned on me today that, because they have a monarchy, their only weapon against the monarchy — which is a "divine right" institution — is to make fun of the upper-class twits that are the residue of nobility. In America, we've never had a monarchy. The presumption is that if you're good enough you can rise to the top. So we don't tend to make fun of people on top, because we're supposed to want our children to become them. But there's a huge class system in America — and, as politics teaches, it's sometimes not even a meritocracy. It's a manipulated casino game. I've been trying to get our democracy back, so I was very serious about these things. And it maybe took that British lack of seriousness about hierarchies to show us how to make fun.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com