War May Be Hell, but Hollywood Is Even Worse.
Despite what you may have read lately, the biggest target of ridicule in “Tropic Thunder,” a flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry, is not the mentally retarded. Rather, the true targets of this extreme comedy’s free-flowing contempt are the stars, makers, brokers, miscellaneous supplicants and even die-hard fans of the movies, who are all portrayed as challenged in some fashion: intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, sartorially, chemically, longitudinally, you name it.
“Tropic Thunder” was directed by one of its stars, Ben Stiller, a professional offender and sometimes very funny man who also shares the movie’s writing credits with Etan Cohen and the actor Justin Theroux (missing in on-screen action here). Over the past decade or so Mr. Stiller has carved out a lucrative niche in the comedy of humiliation, his and everyone else’s. Though this is familiar comic turf (the joke has to be on somebody), he has made it a particular specialty by playing variations on the emasculated patsy — the guy with the penis literally stuck in his zipper in “There’s Something About Mary” and figuratively caught in other roles — who either triumphs over adversity or violently succumbs to it.
The joke is most definitely on, at least initially, Tugg Speedman, the preening, hard-bodied, soft-minded action star Mr. Stiller plays with such intimate knowing in “Tropic Thunder.” A blockbuster sensation who has maxed out the audience’s love with too many sequels and one misbegotten attempt to bait Oscar with a weepie called “Simple Jack,” in which he played a bucktoothed retarded man, Tugg is hoping to resuscitate his career by going gung-ho and grunt in a Vietnam War movie also called “Tropic Thunder.” With his co-stars — notably Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an awards-laden Australian, and Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, a comic partial to fat suits and flatulence — Tugg is headed, yup, into the heartless darkness.
That’s old territory for Mr. Stiller, whose most triumphant excursion into comedy’s dark places remains “The Cable Guy,” a scabrous, much-maligned 1996 riff on mass culture with Jim Carrey at his creepy greatest. “Tropic Thunder” is far slicker than “The Cable Guy” and, given the new film’s obviously lavish budget (the aerial shots alone could bankroll the next Sundance slate), understandably more eager to please.
Mr. Stiller has to seduce the audience he once skewered, which he tries to do by giving it Bruckheimer-size pyrotechnics (the lead actors go AWOL in the jungle) and crude laughs wrung from a host of human frailties. But ever the maximalist, he doesn’t just slice and dice his characters and their weaknesses; he tears them limb from limb, blowing both to smithereens.
And he does it with gusto, especially during the hyperviolent opening movie-set war scene in which body parts go flying, and one actor-soldier attempts to keep his innards from spilling out of his stomach wound. Though this bit is played for obvious laughs and is intentionally phony-looking (the soldier looks as if he had been hit with a big pot of cassoulet rather than mortar), the scene skews more yucky than yukky because Mr. Stiller has so little sense of modulation. He isn’t content simply to decapitate a character, the way, say, Graham Chapman hacked limbs in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”; he also has to play with the stringy bits hanging from the bloodied neck. Mr. Stiller doesn’t kill jokes: he stomps them to death.
That’s how he ends up blowing what might have been the film’s sharpest scene, involving Kirk’s explanation for why Tugg’s performance as a retarded man in “Simple Jack” doomed his chances for an Oscar, an elucidation that includes a clever taxonomy of all the ways it’s permissible to play intellectually challenged in Hollywood (“Forrest Gump” is statuette-worthy, though not “I Am Sam”) and a grindingly unfunny repetition of the word retard. If Mr. Downey — who at this point in his career apparently can do no wrong, even in blackface — can’t make this bit work, it’s because the bit is unworkable. The pomposity of the Oscars is the hook, but it’s the word retard that provides the squirm.
There’s a lot of bait-and-switch throughout “Tropic Thunder,” including its use of blackface, which, along with the promiscuous deployment of the word retard, has earned it much of its advance publicity. Though Mr. Downey’s character, who has undergone a skin-darkening procedure to play his part, has been cut from moldy Fred Williamson cloth, he’s also the most recognizably human character in a lampoon rife with caricatures. One of those is played by an actual black man, Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a rap entrepreneur who peddles an energy drink called Booty Sweat and is mainly around to mock Kirk’s impersonation, which is the filmmakers’ way of having their chocolate cake and eating it too.
What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface. Hands down the most noxious character in “Tropic Thunder” is Les Grossman, the producer of the movie-within-a-movie, who’s played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise under a thick scum of makeup and latex. Heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish, the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest. At one time Mr. Stiller wanted to adapt Budd Schulberg’s brutal satire about a Hollywood hustler, “What Makes Sammy Run?,” to the screen, a long dormant and now perhaps lost project that haunts this otherwise safe film like a wrathful ghost.
“Tropic Thunder” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme carnage and language.
Despite what you may have read lately, the biggest target of ridicule in “Tropic Thunder,” a flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry, is not the mentally retarded. Rather, the true targets of this extreme comedy’s free-flowing contempt are the stars, makers, brokers, miscellaneous supplicants and even die-hard fans of the movies, who are all portrayed as challenged in some fashion: intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, sartorially, chemically, longitudinally, you name it.
“Tropic Thunder” was directed by one of its stars, Ben Stiller, a professional offender and sometimes very funny man who also shares the movie’s writing credits with Etan Cohen and the actor Justin Theroux (missing in on-screen action here). Over the past decade or so Mr. Stiller has carved out a lucrative niche in the comedy of humiliation, his and everyone else’s. Though this is familiar comic turf (the joke has to be on somebody), he has made it a particular specialty by playing variations on the emasculated patsy — the guy with the penis literally stuck in his zipper in “There’s Something About Mary” and figuratively caught in other roles — who either triumphs over adversity or violently succumbs to it.
The joke is most definitely on, at least initially, Tugg Speedman, the preening, hard-bodied, soft-minded action star Mr. Stiller plays with such intimate knowing in “Tropic Thunder.” A blockbuster sensation who has maxed out the audience’s love with too many sequels and one misbegotten attempt to bait Oscar with a weepie called “Simple Jack,” in which he played a bucktoothed retarded man, Tugg is hoping to resuscitate his career by going gung-ho and grunt in a Vietnam War movie also called “Tropic Thunder.” With his co-stars — notably Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an awards-laden Australian, and Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, a comic partial to fat suits and flatulence — Tugg is headed, yup, into the heartless darkness.
That’s old territory for Mr. Stiller, whose most triumphant excursion into comedy’s dark places remains “The Cable Guy,” a scabrous, much-maligned 1996 riff on mass culture with Jim Carrey at his creepy greatest. “Tropic Thunder” is far slicker than “The Cable Guy” and, given the new film’s obviously lavish budget (the aerial shots alone could bankroll the next Sundance slate), understandably more eager to please.
Mr. Stiller has to seduce the audience he once skewered, which he tries to do by giving it Bruckheimer-size pyrotechnics (the lead actors go AWOL in the jungle) and crude laughs wrung from a host of human frailties. But ever the maximalist, he doesn’t just slice and dice his characters and their weaknesses; he tears them limb from limb, blowing both to smithereens.
And he does it with gusto, especially during the hyperviolent opening movie-set war scene in which body parts go flying, and one actor-soldier attempts to keep his innards from spilling out of his stomach wound. Though this bit is played for obvious laughs and is intentionally phony-looking (the soldier looks as if he had been hit with a big pot of cassoulet rather than mortar), the scene skews more yucky than yukky because Mr. Stiller has so little sense of modulation. He isn’t content simply to decapitate a character, the way, say, Graham Chapman hacked limbs in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”; he also has to play with the stringy bits hanging from the bloodied neck. Mr. Stiller doesn’t kill jokes: he stomps them to death.
That’s how he ends up blowing what might have been the film’s sharpest scene, involving Kirk’s explanation for why Tugg’s performance as a retarded man in “Simple Jack” doomed his chances for an Oscar, an elucidation that includes a clever taxonomy of all the ways it’s permissible to play intellectually challenged in Hollywood (“Forrest Gump” is statuette-worthy, though not “I Am Sam”) and a grindingly unfunny repetition of the word retard. If Mr. Downey — who at this point in his career apparently can do no wrong, even in blackface — can’t make this bit work, it’s because the bit is unworkable. The pomposity of the Oscars is the hook, but it’s the word retard that provides the squirm.
There’s a lot of bait-and-switch throughout “Tropic Thunder,” including its use of blackface, which, along with the promiscuous deployment of the word retard, has earned it much of its advance publicity. Though Mr. Downey’s character, who has undergone a skin-darkening procedure to play his part, has been cut from moldy Fred Williamson cloth, he’s also the most recognizably human character in a lampoon rife with caricatures. One of those is played by an actual black man, Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a rap entrepreneur who peddles an energy drink called Booty Sweat and is mainly around to mock Kirk’s impersonation, which is the filmmakers’ way of having their chocolate cake and eating it too.
What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface. Hands down the most noxious character in “Tropic Thunder” is Les Grossman, the producer of the movie-within-a-movie, who’s played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise under a thick scum of makeup and latex. Heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish, the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest. At one time Mr. Stiller wanted to adapt Budd Schulberg’s brutal satire about a Hollywood hustler, “What Makes Sammy Run?,” to the screen, a long dormant and now perhaps lost project that haunts this otherwise safe film like a wrathful ghost.
“Tropic Thunder” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme carnage and language.
No comments:
Post a Comment