‘The Regime’ review: Winslet wins, but it isn’t all bad
Wait, is this f*cking play about us?
I personally loved HBO’s new satire, The Regime.
I really did.
(At least until episodes five and six, where it all got a bit shouty for my tastes.)
Everybody else seems to have absolutely hated it, but I’m trying not to be influenced by that.
I’d go so far as to say that in under four hours, this show did a better job of explaining today’s cautionary tale of a political climate than all of my university-era political science classes combined.
Despite its shockingly low IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, I think The Regime has at least mid sleeper hit potential.
It’s Idiocracy, but with a Succession-level writing room.
It also reminded me a lot of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Glory by Noviolet Bulowayo.
I loved every minute of Winslet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Guillaume Gallienne, and Hugh Grant’s performances, and I had the best time playing ‘spot the real-world political inspo’ that may have informed the show’s creative teams.
We’re introduced to a Chancellor Elena Vernham who—
“took the tiny party her father founded and transformed it into a monster” (a prophecy for Ivanka..?)
—and we adore her immediately, because, well, she’s Kate Winslet, but also because nobody, historically, has ever been able to resist lighting so holy.
We’ll come to understand that Chancellor Vernham is both Lady, and Lord.
Giant portraits of her face hang from every available wall, à la Hussain, al Assad, and pretty much every other problematic leader in at least the last hundred years.
She performs ‘If you leave me now’ Marilyn Monroe slash Marnie-from-Girls-style at her Victory Day Party, where she also tells the US CEO of a cobalt-hungry company to accept her terms, or:
“Hold China’s cock while they piss all over your shoes.”
Vernham also delivers a creepy daily address, signing off with an overly familiar:
“I bless you all, and I bless our love, always.”
Out of curiosity, I looked up Trump’s closing words on the speech he made on January 6th. They were: “God bless you and God Bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.” The word “love” was used 14 times during the speech.
Oh, and The Chancellor also regularly speaks to dead father’s decaying body, which is encased in glass.
We’re lucky Winslet was cast instead of Barry Keoghan, is all I’m saying.
Related: What’s with the choice to make our dictator a woman? Who, incidentally, doesn’t appear to respect other women?
A quick and not at all scientific Google search around “how many dictators have been female” has folks reaching 3100+ years back to Chinese Empress Wu Zetian, and OP doesn’t seem 100% sure of the accuracy of those accounts.
Will Tracy of Succession worked on this, which lends itself to the theory that Vernham is to fascism as Logan Roy was to capitalism — “a composite of various IRL oligarchs.”
Her hypochondria could be a nod to Hitler—
(a “lifelong hypochondriac” with a “dread of cancer”);
Stalin—
(a “fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis, rheumatic aches”);
Jon-Il—
(a “vain, paranoid, cognac-guzzling hypochondriac”); or
Putin—
(a fairly obvious press release circulated and widely picked up by publications of questionable authority in 2022 claimed Putin is “a hypochondriac trying to embalm himself with botox”).
The Husband, aka Nicolas “Elena is very persuasive” Vernham, is brilliantly played by French actor and screenwriter Guillaume Gallienne.
“Sounds a bit chewy for a fashion mag, doesn’t it?”
—Nicolas replies in EP01 when asked by a Vogue journalist about his wife’s government’s surveillance of private citizens.
In this scene, Gallienne’s flawless portrayal of the ruling classes’ self-promotion, stiff upper lip policies, and devaluing of the popular media reminds me all at once of of Prince Philip—
(On his visit to a Caribbean hospital in 1966: “You have mosquitoes. I have the Press.”);
King Charles—
(“The Prince has been prescient in identifying charitable need and setting up and driving forward charities to meet it,” said a 2004 report on the now King’s daily activities), and again,
Donald Trump—
(“The FAKE NEWS media … is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”).
I could keep playing spot the IRL geopolitical parallels for days, but I’ll wrap this up with one final thought.
Do we think it’s an accident the name of the place our beloved dictator forcibly occupies is called “West Gate”..?
I also see strong Putin parallels in the Chancellor’s refusal to call a spade a war, but the West Gate / West Bank similarity seems fairly dead on.
