By the time this review is published, it will have been about a week or so since the most-likely murder of Vladimir Putin critic and Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. And in the fashion of the news cycle, this stunning (though not entirely unanticipated) outcome will likely be relegated to the backs of the minds of most American people. Trump will have said something else irrational, thuggish, or both, and half the American public will understandably become more preoccupied with the issues of once again having our own petulant, narcissistic, shameless fraudster of a president back in power.
My hope is that viewers of HBO’s The Regime, in between the genuine laughs this excellent political satire and black comedy elicits, will be reminded of the very real stakes it discusses. Navalny- and Trump-like figures make excellent martyrs and villains onscreen, but once transposed to the real world, they represent the need for urgent political action. The Regime is excellent viewing about the revitalized and ever-growing issue of autocracy around the world and even in the States. That said, it is often a very funny show, so please don’t imagine it’s as dreary as this opening paragraph.
The Regime, starring Kate Winslet as autocratic Central European chancellor Elena Vernham and Matthias Schoenaerts as loyal right-hand man Corporal Herbert Zubak, is a pitch-black comedy and political satire with excellent dramatic elements to round it out. The story begins when Vernham feels that she needs bodyguards that will resort to even the most brutal tactics to protect her. Enter Zubak, known to people in the unnamed country as “The Butcher” for how he and several other soldiers slaughtered unarmed mining protestors in a recent incident. Where others are disgusted, Vernham is intrigued.
As an audience, we too are intrigued with the ghastly characters onscreen. This comedy-drama is the brainchild of The Menu co-writer and Succession alum Will Tracy. Tracy’s tenure as a writer there, on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and even at satirical news site The Onion has left him well-equipped to create and act as showrunner for a piece of television about the absurdities that attend absolute power and the strange people that crave it.
Elena Vernham is a ridiculous woman. She’s vain, yet insecure. Cunning, but also a bit stupid. She’s a hypochondriac with bizarre beliefs about mold despite having been a well-trained physician in her pre-dictatorial career. She’s a daddy’s girl who has been on a steep mental decline since her father’s death, but she also revels in the fact that she actually achieved the chancellorship while he never could. That she does this reveling in front of his preserved corpse — which she keeps in her palace embalmed and a decorated à la Lenin’s Mausoleum — should tell you all you need to know about the depth and multitude of their relationship’s issues.
Not to be outdone, Vernham’s co-lead is similarly plagued with personal conflict. He wants to make his country better, but he’s in love with the autocrat who’s selling it out to the highest bidder. He sees her in his dreams, and in his mind this is a sign of their shared destiny. What he also sees is a version of his homeland that is independent financially and an emblem of self-determination for other world powers. He wants the Americans out of his country’s lucrative cobalt mines, and he wants the working-class people of his region and throughout the country to be given their dignity and respect. This, of course, puts him at odds with Vernham and her cronies, the government officials and oligarchs that are bleeding the country dry.
Tracy’s writing cements him as one of the best out, worthy of the inevitable comparisons to Armando Iannucci. What makes his writing team’s work so good is that it avoids pamphleteering in favor of something more literary. While her methods are disastrous and unethical, Vernham is sincerely trying to solve the problem of being a nation caught in the middle of two superpowers. America or China? These are, in effect, the only options available to a small Central European country whose glory days have long since faded, if they were ever that great in the first place.
When Vernham declares that her country will become an isolationist powerhouse, we, like her cautious and cunning advisors, know this is a contradiction and an impossibility. But Vernham enjoys contradictory aims. Despite her populist aims, she never understands, as Zubak tells her, “You can’t be Robin Hood and the king at the same time.”
HBO’s The Regime works as a political satire because, like Succession, it lampoons people while remembering their humanity. While the characters are often selfish, odd, or even cruel, there isn’t one that seems one-note or unbelievable. As I said, it’s literary in its understanding of character and relationships: relationships between leaders and their people, between superpowers and satellite states, between lovers and the secret shared world their love creates. Were Elena Vernham simply a cold, calculating Machiavellian, The Regime would be less interesting.
Cunning and amorality are a part of wanting absolute power, but only a part. The other part, that Kate Winslet plays so expertly, is the desperation for adoration — for the people to say they love you and mean it. It’s no wonder Vernham begins and ends her addresses to the nation by calling them “my loves.”
The Regime is welcome viewing in this time of political crisis because, by the end of it, we see that justice can be done in a small fashion. That doesn’t mean that the bad guys always get the cinematic ending we think is just for them, but sometimes they have to live out the rest of their days a shell of their former selves. And other times, as may be the likely case with Mr. Putin, they die in power having dragged their country down with them.
Still, there is hope that their legacy suffers the abuse we hoped they might get in life. There is hope that the death of Alexei Navalny and all the other Navalny-like figures throughout time won’t have been for nothing. Without spoiling too much, I will say that a popular revolt in her country forces Vernham to think about the choices she’s made. We can only hope that the maniacs and misfits trying to grab power in the real world have a similar moment of introspection.
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