dir: Ben Stiller
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If you’d told me that Ben Stiller, yes, that annoying nervy guy with the big ears, was capable of ever making another funny film, I would have metaphorically spat in your face. Maybe not metaphorically, maybe literally! I contend that flicks like Zoolander and many of the other misfires Stiller has been in, just aren’t that funny. I know people who lose control of their bladders at the mere mention of Zoolander, but I’m certainly not one of them.
And I say that as someone who likes Ben Stiller and thinks he’s a funny guy. Funny in the sense that he’s odd, not that he consistently makes me chuckle with his antics or his silly characters in the painfully neurotic films he stars in.
So colour me surprised that I got many a laugh out of Tropic Thunder. Many, many laughs, far more than is usual for me in public. Some parts had me in tears, literal tears of disbelieving, paralysing laughter.
As a fan of war movies, I’ve pretty much seen them all, especially the ones from Nam onwards. Also, I’ve probably seen Saving Private Ryan more times than most mental health professionals would consider healthy. A film that righteously takes the piss out of these films is, perversely, right up my alley. They’re so ripe for parody that they’re practically begging for it.
Stiller doesn’t stop at riffing on Platoon and Saving Private Ryan. Oh no. The whole monstrously bloated all consuming blob that is Hollywood, and the curious people who are its pinnacle are ridiculed for the entirety of the flick’s length. This isn’t a sour deconstruction from someone chewed up and spat out by the system (along the lines of Swimming with Sharks or The Player). This is someone at the top of the popularity / money / studio game yukking it up under the illusion of biting the hand that feeds.
But Stiller’s directing, and his production company (in obvious collaboration) made the flick and put it out there on tens of thousands of screens, to great success. In fact, whatever other dubious distinctions the film has garnered, it managed to beat The Dark Knight at the box office after four glorious weeks at the top.
So it’s been successful. Which is, you know, great for Ben Stiller, if you worry about his feelings, his sense of self-worth and his bank balance.
But if instead, like me, what you really care about when you plonk down hard earned (or hardly earned) money to watch a comedy at the cinema, is whether you’re going to laugh or not with some frequency, then that is the data that really matters.
I laughed a lot. I loved the premise, absurd as it is, and I appreciated that whilst Stiller plays a somewhat not-altogether-bright action movie star past his prime, he doesn’t play a complete moron like he did in Zoolander, a comedy I still find bereft of laughs. But, considering how he wrote the script and directs the flick as well, he gives ample opportunity for the other actors to shine, if shine is in fact what they’re meant to do.
After breaking out with the action blockbuster Scorcher, and then having made multiple sequels exemplifying the concept of the law of diminishing returns, followed by an ill-advised venture into ‘prestige’ moviemaking by playing a retard, Tugg Speedman (Stiller) seeks the credibility and warmth that only comes from awards ceremonies and the respect of his peers.
He, along with committed Method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr), lowbrow comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) and the token ‘kid’ (Jay Baruchel) are starring in the gritty movie version of a celebrated Vietnam veteran’s wartime memoir. They all want to do a good job for different reasons. Kirk Lazarus is so committed to his role as an African-American sergeant, despite being an Anglo-Saxon Australian, that he has undergone a medical blackification procedure. He’s so committed that he always stays in character even when the cameras aren’t rolling. In his own words, when making a movie he stays in character up until the DVD commentary is completed.
In other words, he’s a self-obsessed arsehole overflowing with vanity and with an over-inflated sense of his own importance in the scheme of things. Yes, it’s hard not to be reminded of people like Christian Bale, Daniel Day Lewis, Sean Penn or Robert Downey Jnr.
Tugg wants to earn the credibility that has thus far eluded him, but is also self-involved enough to blow a crucial scene because he thinks the direction he’s been given is inappropriate to his reputation.
The screwed-up scene, which was the most unholy combination of Apocalypse Now’s napalm scene, Platoon’s Elias death scene and Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach sequence, puts the film in danger of never being finished, which does not please the director (Steve Coogan) or the abusive, foul mouthed studio executive making the movie (Tom Cruise). The exec is such a nasty piece of work that over a webcam conference call, he orders the film’s key grip to punch the director hard in the face.
Inspired by the crazed ravings of the Vietnam vet who wrote the novel the film is based on, the director takes the actors out into the middle of the Golden Triangle, and installs cameras and explosives in the jungle with the intention of injecting realism into the picture and putting the actors “in the shit”. This is his last chance to save the film. Of course when the actors playing soldiers finds themselves in the middle of a heroin gang’s territory, the ‘action’ becomes ‘real’.
The movie’s central conceit, and there are several, is that Tugg Speedman isn’t bright enough to realise that the situation is no longer a staged, organised event until it is way too late, and he is at the mercy of the drug lords. The problem the other actors face is that they’re actors ill-equipped to deal with a life and death situation, and they’re at the mercy of the young kid actor who actually read the script and attended the boot camp the other actors were meant to attend.
Hilarity ensues, with varying degrees of success, but a surprisingly high level of consistency. The premise is rich with satirical opportunities, though not for a second could anyone term the manner in which matters transpire or shit happens as being anything close to subtle. It’s a flat-out, over the top comedy with big personalities doing big, dumb shit. But it works, boy howdy does it work.
I won’t delve too deeply into everything that goes on in the film, but I will say that there were moments and sequences of sheer brilliance in this flick. The first for me involves a conversation between Tugg and Kirk, where Tugg tries explaining to the ‘superior’ actor who intimidates him outright, that when he played Simple Jack, that he really went all out, thus establishing his bona fides as a ‘real’ actor. Of course Kirk then points out to him that success in Hollywood never comes from playing a complete retard. You should never go completely retard, he tells him. And he’s right, citing examples of Oscar success and critical failure dependant on ‘how’ retarded performers portrayed their characters. Remember these words of wisdom and remember them well: Never go full retard.
In the strangest way, when the issue of Simple Jack arises again after he’s captured by the drug lords, and it is revealed that his only chance of survival is staging five performances of Simple Jack a day, well, let’s just say that I thought it was one of the funniest things Ben Stiller has ever been involved with. Fucking brilliant.
The resolution of that story, and the manner in which it ends on a bridge, involving an ‘adopted’ son, an improvised Oscar and a child having to be treated in a way that would make Michael Jackson proud, had me weeping with laughter. Not many people were laughing around me in the cinema, but I thought it was the pinnacle of what had already been a pretty strong comedy.
There’s so much other stuff going on, so much other rich stuff in the flick that singling out specific people or performances is fruitless. Some stuff doesn’t work (the Tom Cruise stuff worked when he was being profane and abusive, less so when he keeps performing the unfunny dancing whilst wearing the fat suit). And Jack Black is in the film, which is a shame. But at the very least he’s not as annoying as he usually is.
Robert Downey Jnr: I’m sick of constantly praising the guy in almost everything he does. His performance here isn’t subtle, and possibly isn’t sane, but he is as dependably great as always, even if I couldn’t understand what he was saying some of the time. No one, this year or for a few years to come, is going to deliver a line like “I’m a lead farmer, motherfuckers!” with as much gusto and timing as Downey does here.
When I was walking out of the cinema, after having been thoroughly entertained, I noticed a group of school age private school guys filing out, one of whom could be heard to mutter “Well, that was a total dog”, to which the others muttered agreement. So I’m not under the illusion that the film is going to be held to be universally funny (no comedy ever is). There were a fair few times when I was laughing alone, with nary a chuckle from the other patrons.
I think it’s a generational thing as well. There’s less for the young folk to find funny, especially if they never saw the slew of Nam flicks that came out in the 80s. At the risk of going out on a limb too far, I think, those fucking whippersnappers notwithstanding, the film’s appeal is broader than just looking at it as a parody of action / war flicks. At heart it’s more a rip on the egos some of these actors carry around, or have their entourage of assistants carry around, and on the whole insanity of the Hollywood dream factory.
Matthew McConaughey, who is funny for the first time in any movie that I can think of, plays Tugg’s agent with the kind of desperate monomania that would be frightening in any other profession or art form. He is hilarious, and follows his character’s natural arc leading up to a gag of such profound stupidity and yet such appropriateness that I’ll forgive it only this once. And yet the funniest thing he’s responsible for is for being in the foreground of a shot where a mechanical advertising stand promoting Simple Jack can be seen still operating in the background of his office, such is his dedication to Tugg. Also, the gag about the adopted children, the Hollywood accessory du jour, is priceless, right down to the expression on his face in the photo.
Funny shit. There is some really funny shit here, and thus far it is the comedy of the year. Which isn’t saying much, since there’s usually only about three funny ones out of the three hundred that are released annually. Ben Stiller managed to surprise me by delivering wholeheartedly for once, and delivering in fine form a picture I can laud without embarrassment. You, sir, still have the skills to pay the bills.
8 times Downey Jnr and Stiller deserve all the criticism from the mentally disabled advocates and African American community that they received, because that just makes the flick funnier out of 10
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“Now, the only person who could make a difference before, will make a difference again!” – Tropic Thunder.
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