Armando Ianucci’s acidly deadpan new comedy “In The Loop” charts a few frantic days in the lives of mid-level political operatives in the U.S. and U.K. in the lead-up to the Iraq War. An empty suit of an MP creates a squall in the British media when he absentmindedly calls the war “unforeseeable”. The MP, Simon Foster, slowly discovers how little control he has over his political destiny and how ruthlessly his media consigliore, Malcolm Tucker, dominates the British spin machine.

Terror and bafflement scud across Simon’s face throughout the film; he looks like a sleepwalker who awakens in the middle of the night to find himself tip-toeing on a high wire in a circus tent over a pit of alligators. For him, “in the loop” might just as easily mean “in the noose”. Meanwhile, Tucker, as the demented ringleader, restores order by flogging anyone and everyone in earshot with a sarcastic wit bordering on the pathological. Its caustic humor, delight in imbeciles, and mockudrama style make the film a classic in the vein of “The Office” and “This Is Spinal Tap”.

If Tucker’s napalm tongue and flair for neologisms (“catastrofuck”) flow like comic quicksilver, the movie’s sympathies lie with poor Simon, a tour de force of beleaguered mediocrity played with exquisite panache by Tom Hollander. Simon is never presented as anything but a feckless pawn too stupid to get out of his own way, yet Hollander manages to make Simon likable. He’s less a moron than a waffling careerist possessing a middling intellect untroubled by convictions of any kind. For every one of Simon’s botched public utterances (to clarify his first comment, he offers, “We must...climb...the mountain of conflict...not to say that the war is the mountain, but...”) he shows off a barbed tongue of his own, such as the dressing-down he gives Toby for showing up late to a meeting. His brains mean he isn’t an outright clown, keeping the film in the realm of satire. But the gods conspire to keep Simon permanently out of his depth, and Hollander gives Simon a touch of vertigo when he delivers lines like, “Right now my brain is completely empty except for a little voice in the back of my head going ‘Oh shit’ over and over again, like a car alarm going off in the middle of the night”.

Tucker, the insider who discretely runs the show, belongs to the family of whiplash firebrands which also includes Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” and Billy Bob Thornton in “Primary Colors”. The film assumes that we already know that what we see on TV is meaningless theater. Everything is showbiz; nothing is authentic; even the smallest details are hashed out by expert spin doctors working behind the scenes. These are givens. In “Primary Colors”, the portrayal is typical: the lies come so thick it’s hard to figure out where the candidate really stands, but in the end the lies add up to some sort of palpable truth. Politics circles around to be exactly what we thought it was. Conservatives war with liberals over the governance of the nation. Deals are made, compromises struck, consensuses formed. The reassuring point is that political fictions still serve a legitimate democratic purpose. Words correlate to deeds.

But “In The Loop” suggests that the hidden layer of insider political machinery has become an end in itself. The titular loop is a circle of logic and language that does not intersect with the real world. Neither the hawks in Washington nor their understudies in London seem to want the war with Iraq, as such. They merely want to win the battle of wits. Only rarely do the players seem to be aware of the real-world stakes. To say that a boob like Simon isn’t in touch with reality is nothing. He’s a classic political stooge, the sort of expendable player the system grinds up as a necessary sacrifice. His dimness draws laughs, but Ianucci’s real interest is in the puppet-masters, British and American, who feed him lines.

The morning after Simon’s first ill-starred interview, for instance, Tucker flatly decrees to his media contacts that Simon hasn’t said the word “unforeseeable” even though he plainly did. Toward the end, as the allies cobble together evidence to bolster the casus belli, words are twisted so badly that a report against the war magically transforms into one supporting it. A few cut and pastes and the lives of millions are changed. Throughout, the language is detached, free-floating, and fluid. Any underlying logic—to the extent that it’s visible at all—swallows its own tail. Thus Simon can call himself a “fake hawk” and apparently mean it. The result is a final catastrofuckical loop: “We are going to war because the intelligence was accurate, and the intelligence was accurate because we went to war”.

Is Ianucci floating the Orwellian suggestion that corruption in our democracies is linked to the degradation of our language? Perhaps. Ianucci certainly has fun calling into question the essential qualifications of the people who run the world. They don’t exist on a higher intellectual plane than ours. In fact, they sound dangerously average. J.K. Rowling is mentioned more than Plato, Mill or Jefferson; Tucker calls Toby “Ron Weasley” and the British Ambassador “Lord Voldemort”, and later name-checks “The Crying Game” and “Eraserhead”. General Miller calls Toby “Frodo”. The Iraqi informant’s code name is “Ice Man”. At a rock club in Georgetown, Liza and Toby observe Hill staffers in a mosh pit, watching with superior detachment as Washington’s future leaders thrash about like deranged monkeys. A few drinks later, they’re head-banging alongside them.

The big politics are mirrored by petty workplace sniping. Tucker is an angry Scotsman who hates cleaning up after the windbags from the English public schools. When Judy (Gina McKee) takes a call from Tucker, who’s in Washington to find out the location of the secret committee meeting, she gloats over the fact that he’s begging her to tell him from London what’s going on in D.C. Once Liza’s dissenting report is circulated, her rival Bob gleefully mocks her suddenly doubtful career prospects. Remarking on her report earning an acronym, he laughs and says “Yeah—should be D.O.A.!” Ianucci hints that while these “elites” are wittier than you and I, their intellectual range isn’t wider. They’re like you and I. They just happen to have the fate of the world in their hands.

Though the film deftly and hilariously navigates this swirling vortex of half-truths, posturing, lying, doublespeak, and vacuous pomo politics, Ianucci adds little to our understanding of how governments operate or how wars are drummed up. If anything, the film isn’t nearly absurd enough to match the reality of what actually took place. A donkey-brained cipher in the Oval Office, Dick Cheney and his “Office of Special Planning”, Colin Powell and his PowerPoint slides, the CIA’s bumbling, a populist propaganda campaign as rich in distortions of language as anything Orwell imagined: these are outrages Ianucci doesn’t even try to approximate. By the end, the movie loses its satiric thrust, stuck in a bubble of self-referential words. Recently, Oliver Stone’s “W” was sharper in anatomizing the personalities and circumstances that led to the war.

No, “In The Loop” shines brightest in the relentlessly inventive nastiness of its language and its delight in the ways highly pressurized humans step on each other to move up the ladder of success. It is better viewed as an office comedy—admittedly, a really strange and complicated office—than a political satire. The quotability of the dialogue makes repeat viewings mandatory for this ferociously funny comedy. That is, if you can accurately quote lines like “Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock!” to your friends. I wouldn’t try. Best we leave that to the professionals.