In 1940, Charlie Chaplin destroyed Adolf Hitler in his brilliant satirical warning “The Great Dictator.”
In 2012, Sacha Baron Cohen tried his hand at his own zany spoof in the less successful “The Dictator.”
Now, it’s Kate Winslet’s turn in the new HBO miniseries “The Regime,” which premiered last weekend for a lavishly slow and tonally awkward experience that I hope improves when Episode 2 arrives on Sunday.
Set in present day, Winslet plays Chancellor Elena Vernham, the agoraphobic dictator of an unnamed Central European nation as she watches her carefully-constructed autocracy unravel behind the palace walls.
By now, Winslet’s career credentials are beyond reproach. After her breakthrough in Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” (1996), she became an iconic movie star in James Cameron’s “Titanic” (1997) and starred in gems like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) and “Revolutionary Road” (2007) before winning an Oscar for “The Reader” (2008) and earning an Emmy for the acclaimed HBO mystery miniseries “Mare of Easttown” (2021).
In “The Regime,” she commands the screen from the moment the doors open for her first appearance. She expertly portrays a woman on the brink of a mental health collapse like Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), only imagine if she ran a country. Winslet’s eyes dart as she anxiously wears a mask (echoing COVID), as well as extreme measures like having a staffer follow her around with a handheld device to measure humidity.
These carefully-constructed methods embarrass her when visited by American diplomats like Judith Holt (Martha Plimpton) seeking a majority stake in her country’s cobalt mines. Such colonization is called out by Herbert Zuback (Matthias Schoenaerts), a disgraced soldier who goes from face-slapping scapegoat to most-trusted adviser urging her to clean house by firing her staff, including Palace Manager Agnes (Andrea Riseborough).
Creator Will Tracy delegates directing duties to Stephen Frears (“The Queen”) and Jessica Hobbs (“The Crown”) with pristine shots of elegant production design within the regal halls of a decaying palace, not to mention sharp power suits worn by Winslet. Everything is in its proper place and any disruption causes a meltdown, namely an assassination attempt that sends her fleeing for a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in a panic: “I breathed him!”
How exactly did she get to be this way? There’s a hint that a lung illness killed her father, whose rotting corpse she now visits in a glass coffin in the basement, lamenting his skin spots like “out, damned spot” in “Macbeth.” I’m also curious to see how she actually came to power, apparently having ousted her predecessor Edward Keplinger (Hugh Grant) seven years earlier. I guess I’ll stick with it to learn more of her back story over the full six episodes.
Still, I’m never quite sure whether to grin or cringe. It’s hard to laugh when it’s dangerously close to becoming a reality in America. When Groucho Marx invited us to sing “Hail Freedonia” in “Duck Soup” (1933) we laughed our butts off because we didn’t think it could ever happen here. Even when Chaplin delivered his impassioned speech at the end of “The Great Dictator” (1940), it was warning against some foreign dictator in some faraway land.
Now, “The Regime” hits a little too close to home with the United States on the brink of a constitutional crisis. Democratic elections can’t have consequences if losing candidates simply shout “rigged,” refusing the peaceful transition of power despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud, then claiming full presidential immunity to act above the law. Years from now I may be able to look back and laugh at “The Regime,” but right now, it’s too real.
It attempts to drop “Dr. Strangelove” bombs of satire at a time when we need dire “Oppenheimer” warnings.
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