“The Regime,” starring Kate Winslet, is HBO’s latest prestige series and it never goes deeper than its elevator pitch: “Veep” meets “Succession,” but set inside an authoritarian government.
Those inspirations are literal. Creator Will Tracy might be better known as the co-writer of 2022’s “The Menu” but his credits also include “Succession,” and executive producer Frank Rich is a “Veep” alum. But do we really need another darkly humorous portrayal of the power-mad and their humanizing dysfunctions?
Winslet plays the ridiculous and floridly paranoid dictator of an unnamed Central European republic. She somehow seized power despite her many deficiencies and psychological instabilities, some of which stem from a dead father who lies embalmed and on display in a glass coffin. During one of her regular visits to his crypt, she flops down a bouquet of flowers: “Here, these are dead, you’re dead, lots in common, much to discuss.”
She is a grandiose narcissist surrounded by opportunistic political appointees (plus her husband) forever manipulating her to their own goals. “Our Lady of the Shrinking GDP,” one of them dubs her, as the economy spirals down the toilet.
She is also hypochondriac (if you believe worries about toxic mold qualify as hypochondria) and her obsessions subside only after a soldier (Matthias Schoenaerts) joins her inner circle. He’s a rough-hewn type from the countryside who convinces her that folk remedies will do the trick, and she takes the bait. Is he a Rasputin-like figure? The show can’t make up its mind. He claims to be a man of the people — who also shot and killed striking workers, which is why everyone calls him “The Butcher.” Hypocrisy can be a fascinating character trait but he’s given no motivation, no point of view, no political anything. What does he believe?
His presence is the catalyst that sends the chancellor over the edge in a frenzy of lust, egotism and policy screwups, inciting famine and a civil war. Don’t bother wondering what the country’s population thinks of all this. “The Regime” certainly doesn’t. Everyday people are abstractions.
Narratively and thematically incoherent, “The Regime” offers no one to root for. That’s fine. But it’s hard to feel any investment in the outcome. There’s some middling critique of the U.S. and its paternalistic approach to geopolitical diplomacy, but it lacks the guts to get in some real jabs. Over its six episodes, the show has the energy of a comedy without much actual comedy. When a moment lands, it’s almost despite itself — or coasting on the fumes of pastiche. Winslet‘s chancellor takes the stage at a state dinner to sing an off-key version of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” while her husband accompanies her on the keyboard, and it plays like a recycled mashup of Kendall Roy rapping at his father’s birthday on “Succession” and that old “Saturday Night Live” sketch with Ana Gasteyer and Will Ferrell as a pair of corny lounge singers.
Spiritual nourishment comes at a premium and “The Regime” arrives on our screens at a moment of great emergency and despair and mass human tragedy. It’s worth thinking critically about which narratives — whose stories — Hollywood executives deem worthy of their considerable backing.
“The Regime” is a critique in a vacuum which makes it no critique at all, a reconstruction masquerading as deconstruction. It is likely also taking inspiration from the 1940 comedy “The Great Dictator” starring Charlie Chaplin as a fictional Hilter-eseque character as well as a Jewish barber who looks just like him.
The movie is buoyant and silly and full of physical humor. It’s also just as interested in what life is like for the average (persecuted) person as the one in power. When the plot culminates in a case of mistaken identity, it creates an opening for Chaplin — who was also the film’s writer and director — to drop the comedy in favor of something riskier: Sincerity. His barber has some choice words for his fellow countrymen:
“Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. … We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”
Nearly a century later, nothing in the speech is dated and its enough to make you sob. The speech is rousing and hopeful and a rallying cry for something better. I can’t remember the last time Hollywood gave us an earnest and full-throated critique of tyranny that wasn’t hidden behind a smirk.
“The Regime” has other goals. It strikes one cynical pose after another, numbing audiences with its expensive, sleek, irony-soaked style of pessimism. A small number of people were paid enormous sums of money to sell audiences on defeatism. There is no escape, only escapism. Instead of Netflix and chill, we’ve descended to the next level: Nihilism and chill, as if shows like “The Regime” or “Succession” are the only ways to respond to the rot and fear of our current moment. But that presumes anything else would be too solemn. This isn’t true. But it’s easy to think otherwise when there are so few recent examples outside of “Abbott Elementary” that get it right. A sharp and observant comedy can also be unembarrassed in its belief that if we refuse to give up, the worst outcomes are not a foregone conclusion.
Decades after he made “The Great Dictator,” Chaplin had second thoughts about the movie. “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made ‘The Great Dictator,’” he wrote in his autobiography. “I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” But the speech at the end is exactly why the movie works, because it understands that mockery is not an endgame. To be hopeful in the face of cruelty and oppression — and to quit settling for lazy comic resignation — might be the boldest creative choice there is.
“The Regime” — 1 star (out of 4)
Where to watch: 8 p.m. Sundays on HBO (streaming on Max)
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
