Tropic Thunder
A number of years back I was standing in line somewhere (for a movie, most likely) when I heard two senior ladies behind me:
Senior #1: Did you see that commercial? It was terrible!
Senior #2: Which one?
#1: The one with that little girl saying 'when I grow up I wanna work in a cubicle', or something like that.
#2: Oh yes. All those people, saying they wanted to be this and that. 'I want to be underappreciated'. Yeah. Terrible.
I laughed out loud. I couldn't help it. The commercial to which they were referring was for the web job site Monster.com. If you've never seen it, take a gander:
Anyway, what made me laugh was the realization that often people just don't get it. There really are people who are that clueless. Clearly this ad was not marketed to the demographic of our retirees, but still. Perhaps irony wasn't in the drinking water for the "greatest generation" like it was for the Boomers, Xers, and the subsequent.
I thought of this while listening to an NPR interview with Special Olympics chair Tim Shriver this week. He was on the air to denounce the new comedy TROPIC THUNDER, for its caricatures of developmentally and cognitively delayed (the most PC terms I can muster at this time) individuals. "The word 'retard' is used 17 times," exclaimed Shriver, who was planning to picket the opening night showings. He and others (who have not seen the movie) are calling for boycotts. When I heard this, it cemented my desire to see this film. Publicity such as this is pure gold for a film like TROPIC THUNDER, a cheerfully obscene, no-holds-barred Hollywood satire.
After watching the movie tonight, I can only conclude that Mr. Shirver is an unfortunate member of the irony deficient club, those anemic souls who wouldn't recognize a lampoon if it clocked them in the mandible. If he had seen the entire film, he would (hopefully) understand that the filmmakers clearly were not intending to merely stand back and laugh at those with disabilities. But I digress. This film was a mostly dead-on take of the business of acting and filmmaking. Director Ben Stiller has taken the correct approach: loud, chaotic, vulgar, and even violent means to parody the sort of self-absorption that does not allow for real human contact, or behavior. Virtually every charcter in this film is so enmeshed in Hollywood nonsense that they are unable to relate to anyone or anything in a productive way. No one is spared, not the writers, directors, special effects guys. But the brunt of this trenchant satire is placed on the actors, agents, and studio chiefs.
Vietnam vet Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte, doing his best growly alpha male bit) is about to see his memoir Tropic Thunder become a major motion picture. Once underway, the shoot doesn't go well. Diva behavior by the actors is causing expensive disruptions. Tayback decides that the actors need to "live" their roles as weary soldiers. He masterminds a sort of boot camp (the kind actors on the real film PLATOON underwent) in which the pampered stars will be stripped of their ecoutrements and live like dogs in foxholes, eat cold c-rations, the whole bit. Things turn very, very bad.
The actors: Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a fading action hero trying for yet another comeback. His recent attempt to do a prestigious drama, SIMPLE JACK, was a notrious failure. You see, Jack is a "retard", and Speedman overdid it a bit. "You went 'full retard'", says fellow actor Kirk Lazerus (Robert Downey Jr.), "and that don't work. You didn't see Dustin Hoffman or Tom Hanks or Sean Penn overdo it like that." Lazerus himself (a multiple Oscar winning Australian) goes over the line in his own offensive way, so dedicated to his thespianism that he decides to play an African-American soldier named Osiris and undergoes a surgical procedure which tints his skin dark. He goes all Method and stays in charcter between takes. He speaks in a stereotyped accent and spouts the kind of street talk mainly heard in 70s blaxploitation pictures. Jack Black plays Jeff Portnoy, a comedy star whose humor centers on flatulence. As the film opens, we are treated to uproarious fake trailers featuring these and other characters.
As I stated, TROPIC THUNDER is a big, noisy spectacle spoofing big noisy spectacles. There is always the danger of becoming the very thing which you are satirizing (see NATURAL BORN KILLERS, for one), but here it makes complete sense. There's just no other way. Stiller and company took Mel Brooks' old advice: sometimes you have to rise below vulgarity. And make no mistake, this is a seriously profane movie, especially when we get to meet one of the other film's main targets, a corpulent nightmare of a man named Les Grossman. Grossman is a studio head who chomps cigars, threatens and demeans subordinates, screams for Diet Cokes, and punctuates every sentence with some amazingly creative obscenity. He'll decimate anyone, at any time to save his picture. It seems that this character is based on people like Harvey Weinstein and enfant terrible producer Scott Rudin (who was known to shout demands of "string cheese!" to his staff). You may have heard that Tom Cruise, clad in a bald wig and fat suit, plays this cretin. He has a whale of a time with the part. It has to be seen to be believed.
The ham comes in huge doses. Most comedies showcase one cut-up; this film has a whole cast of 'em. Stiller, Black, Matthew McConaughey, Cruise, and others all get multiple chances to shine. But this film belongs to Downey Jr. ASTONISHING performance. Talk about disappearing into a character! As an Aussie playing a black man, well, you just have to see it. He plays broad, as you would expect. But what stunned me was the multitude of subtleties he brough to his expressions, his pauses; it was like watching a master class in acting. His timing and nuance was so good it reminded me of Your Show of Shows, that 50s chestnut with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. That show is the yardstick against what any comedic material worth its salt should be measured. Downey transforms what could've been a cheap, offensive idea into comedic perfection. His performance will become part of some Pantheon.
Will the film itself join such ranks? Probably not, as it is too varaible to be a complete success. It does get to be a bit much at times. After a smashing opening, the film loses momentum for a good while before hitting its stride again somewhere around the mid-section. The ideas finally gel at about the time Stiller's character is kidnapped by real soldiers, an army of minions protecting a heroin factory in the jungle. The hit-miss gag ratio is favorable, but there are still a number of duds. In any event, I expect TROPIC THUNDER will be quoted for years to come.
One of the best parts of my THUNDER experience, however, was the audience with which I saw the movie. I was expecting a gallery of buffoons. To my surprise, the theater turned out tonight to be filled with literate, knowing patrons. Sure, there's plenty of crass humor in the movie for the masses, but my audience also laughed at even the most subtle touches. How refreshing. They GOT IT. Somehow, they understood that the barbs were directed at inward looking narcissists and not an ethnic groups or the handicapped. There's indeed hope for mankind yet.
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