Full Metal jackass
So many P.C. alarms and bells go off while you’re watching Tropic Thunder, the Ben Stiller comedy with Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black, that the controversy over its machine-gun use of the word “retard” amounts to a tiny shout-out from Whoville. The fact is, this Vietnam War movie comedy (theoretically) offends Vietnam vets, African-Americans, Brits, Vietnamese, all other Asians, gays and rich, pampered Hollywood stars (not necessarily in that order). And Stiller, who wrote the script with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, no doubt had controversy in mind while making the film.
It opens with four fake movie trailers that, one by one, skewer dumbo action stars and sequels (can you say Scorcher VI?), hip-hop endorsements (for an actual beverage released by the film’s makers called “Booty Sweat”), flatulent body-suit comedies (as perfected by Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers) and serious “Oscar bait” fare (gay monks romping in Satan’s Alley to an Enigma soundtrack).
So the fake clips that follow from Simple Jack, featuring Stiller as a, well, simple-minded but endearing farm boy, are not the least of this movie’s problems in the political correctness department. Stiller, after all, has never been known for his good taste.
But fear not, no one is seriously injured by Tropic Thunder. In the end, all things resolve in typical modern Hollywood comedy fashion, with the overreaching action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller), Australian Method actor Kirk Lazarus (Downey) and substance-abusing comedian Jeff “Fats” Portnoy (Black) all learning valuable life lessons, even as the retard jokes pile up in their wake.
The guy who steals the show, of course, is Downey Jr. as an Oscar-winning Aussie actor who undergoes pigmentation surgery to play a black grunt in the ill-fated Vietnam War flick, Tropic Thunder. He’s “a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude,” and he schools Stiller’s character as to why Speedman didn’t get an Oscar nod for Simple Jack: “You went full retard. Look at other actors that got Oscars. They pulled back. Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man? Autistic, yes, but still endearing. Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump? Simple-minded, but he could kick Chinese ass in ping-pong. Peter Sellers in Being There, same thing. All got Oscars. Now look at Sean Penn in I Am Sam. He went full retard. No Oscar.”
This must be one of those Hollywood mysteries that amuse Stiller to this day: how actors continue to get awarded for playing ugly or mentally handicapped characters. Of course, the P.C. police could have as easily descended on the choice of Downey playing a black man — but as you can see, it’s kind of essential to the plot.
When the two main actors in Tropic Thunder blow an expensive treeline explosion shot by bickering over who gets to cry in the closeup, film consultant Nick Nolte suggests a radical solution: plunk them down “in country” and make the film guerrilla-style. This leads to vignettes that poke fun at just about every Vietnam War film ever made, not to mention the films made by the featured actors. The fact that Stiller, Downey, Black and Brandon T. Jackson (playing a hip-hop star/actor named Alpa Chino) laugh at themselves as pampered actors doesn’t change the fact that they are pampered actors, and would probably be reluctant to film this big-budget comedy in, say, the Philippine jungles (they shot in comfortable Hawaii, near Stiller’s beach pad, instead). So they’re playing dudes disguised as dudes who have to rough it.
The truth is, poking fun at Hollywood actors is like Tasering fish in a barrel, and I am a little uncomfortable that Stiller et al think this self-parody gives them license to make stereotypical black jokes, gay jokes, fat jokes and “retard” jokes. Certain groups, you could argue, need a little more protection than others. And despite Tropic Thunder’s opening gore (intestines spill, Stiller’s hands get blown off), it’s clear these guys have little notion of how horrifying war must actually be for real-life soldiers. It’s all played for laughs. And we do indeed laugh, because the references aren’t to real life, but to reel life.
Tropic Thunder belongs, then, to a species of modern cinema that it’s not inaccurate to call MTV Comedy. The presence of Adam Sandler, Owen Wilson, Stiller, Black or Vince Vaughn are tip-offs to this genre. The stars mentioned usually trot out onstage during the actual MTV Movie Awards show to either plug the movie or do some “bit” that’s tied into the audience’s recognition that the film is coming out soon, or is already out. Young audiences are then chuffed to realize they got the joke and are so hip and quick on the draw. This demographic pandering is not so odd, considering that Stiller got his start making short “link” films (with Janeane Garofalo) between presentations on the MTV Movie Awards (the Zoolander character developed from there, for instance), way back before Meet the Parents, Cable Guy and even Reality Bites. So Stiller’s oeuvre is custom-made to hit the laugh buttons of MTV-raised audiences. They were groomed, in short, to get the references and blog about them accordingly.
Movie references fly about like friendly fire in Tropic Thunder, and even I lost count. Of course, there’s the above-mentioned trailers and their respective genres. There’s the slo-mo shot of Stiller crossing a ‘Nam field, riddled incessantly with bullets until his arms raise and jerk around in a mock-homage to Willem Dafoe’s mock-savior death scene in Platoon. There are the inevitable nods to Apocalypse Now (favorite line: Stiller telling his co-star, “I want you to tell people what happened here.” Co-star, truly puzzled: “What happened here?”) and even a subplot that tweaks Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Downey’s gung-ho cry of “Get some!” (the movie’s tagline after “Go full retard” was nixed) echoes Kubrick’s kill-crazed chopper gunner in Full Metal Jacket. There are even sly nods to Spielberg (Nick Nolte’s weird-guy-at-the-back-of-the-room channels Robert Shaw’s Quint in Jaws; a mountain of heroin resembles the mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and a soundless Saving Private Ryan homage comes after the final explosion). There are also a few kung fu kicks and a panda attack that, inevitably, remind us of Jack Black’s recent hit, Kung Fu Panda.
But the weirdest surprise has to be the participation of Tom Cruise as pit-bull studio head Les Grossman. Donning a fat suit and a gorilla’s worth of glued-on body hair, Cruise gets to swear a blue streak and mimic his own booty-shaking scene from Risky Business. That’s reason enough to watch the end credits.
What we finally get in Tropic Thunder is an enterprise made up almost entirely of in-jokes and specific references to Hollywood. Sure, it lacks the skill or gravity of Robert Altman’s The Player. But it’s an inside Hollywood spoof nonetheless. At its best, Tropic Thunder is like watching one of the movies made by wacko director Billy Walsh in Entourage. It’s out there, though not too far out there. You know everyone’s gonna come home safe and sound, a bit wiser and a hell of a lot richer.
