By Greg Oguss
In the age of YouTube, Gawker and TMZ, the life of a Hollywood actor is no bed of roses. I’m unaware of any famous action star who’s actually been held hostage by a gang of Southeast Asian heroin farmers after being sent on a suicide mission with four other prima donna actors by a power-mad British director in desperate pursuit of verisimilitude during the making of a massively over-budget Vietnam war film. That’s the plot of Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder and the fate of his character, Tugg Speedman, a star with a no-longer profitable franchise whose future as an A-Lister is in doubt. The poppy field that the actors turned ersatz Vietnam grunts encounter when they cross the border into Laos or perhaps Mynnamar is also an analogy for the temptations which all actors’ face when they reach mega-stardom. Every character in this brilliantly funny satire rings a variation on theme of the kinds of extreme behavior which Hollywood demands from its successes if they want to hold the public’s attention.
Robert Downey, Jr.’s Kirk Lazarus, a pompous Australian method actor known for losing himself inside his characters, undergoes a “pigmentation alteration” operation to play the platoon’s African-American sergeant. Giving a blackface performance that owes much to 1970s action star Fred Williamson and often plays like a highlight reel from the funniest moments of the blaxploitation era, Downey’s character is a send-up of the excesses of the late Heath Ledger, Russell Crowe, and Downey himself. Contrary to reviewers who’ve dubbed it too “insider” and the LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas who whined it wasn’t as “naughty” as the PC police warned, the film is fearless, taking shots at many well-known sacred cows just like Downey’s father did in Putney Swope, a send-up of American racial attitudes circa 1969. Other note-perfect Hollywood parodies in Tropic Thunder include Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, a no-brow comedian with a fart-movie franchise, a drug habit and a weight problem who’s equal parts Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy and, well, Jack Black. When the squad approaches a heroin farm where Speedman is being held for ransom, Portnoy’s drug addiction forces the troupe’s geeky youngster Kevin (Jay Baruchel) to literally tie him to a tree. Portnoy is soon jonesing so bad he’s calling Kevin’s mom a “cankerous whore.” In the next breath, he’s promising to massage Kevin’s balls, suck his shaft and “swallow the gravy” if only Kev will cut him loose. It’s the best moment in the film for Black’s Portnoy, perhaps the most pathetic character in a cast of uber-famous stars having a fantastic time playing versions of themselves at their worst.
Among the mega-stars, Tom Cruise portrays a foul-mouthed, ass-shaking ogre of a movie mogul named Les Grossman. Cruise’s scene-stealing turn as the producer of the film-within-the-film allows him to re-direct all of the negativity that’s been hurled at him since fame drove him around the bend. The result is a gonzo portrayal on par with Michael Lerner’s crazed 1940s movie mogul from the Coen brothers’ Hollywood parody Barton Fink. Barton Fink and Robert Altman’s The Player were the last satires of the film biz as sharp-edged as Tropic Thunder. So it’s no surprise that Ethan Coen gets a co-screenplay credit on Stiller’s film.
The “one-of-every ethnic” casting in the war film genre is upheld via Brandon T. Jackson’s rapper-entrepreneur Alpha Chino, whose presence offers the opportunity to mock the obviousness of film product-placements with his non-stop hawking of his “Booty Sweat protein drinks” and “Bust-a-Nut energy bars.” Like every other character, Alpha Chino is not what he pretends to be and doesn’t love “the pussy” nearly as much as his rep suggests. The presence of Alpha Chino, who confronts Lazarus about the blackface issue, is the movie’s way of defusing any potential complaints about racial insensitivity. When Alpha Chino and Speedman ask Lazarus why he won’t step out of character and drop his minstrel-speak once the film-within-the-film goes awry, the Australian can only answer, “I don’t know.” The answer is because he’s good at it. Thus, it earns him the attention he craves, which is what drives all Hollywood successes to the extreme forms of behavior which the movie spoofs so well. This is the central irony that commentators and protesters have missed amidst the “r-word” controversy which the movie has sparked.
During some down-time in the jungle, Lazarus gives Speedman a bit of hysterical advice on an ill-advised film in which Tugg played a simpleton entitled Simple Jack. The scene brilliantly delves into the minutiae of Academy voters’ preferences with Lazarus’s advice that Tugg went off-track because, unlike Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks, he went “full-retard” and was dissed as a result. But the movie’s use of the word “retard” during this exchange has also made it the target of protests by a host of disability groups. The mainstream critics have generally supported Stiller’s right to be offensive and pointed out that the film is an equal-opportunity offender. But like Downey’s minstrel performance, the “Simple Jack” character is tied to the film’s central theme. Speedman is soon forced to act out the entire god-awful film for his captors in order to save his life. In the process, he discovers he’d rather hide inside the character forever than return to a cutthroat world where a movie mogul is willing to let his captors kill him in order to file an insurance claim and realize a profit on a doomed film.
The flap over the “r-word” has validated the premise of Tropic Thunder that even the silliest controversy garners attention these days, provoking increasingly outrageous headline-grabbing behavior from celebrities. Hollywood is a rough town. To quote Woody Allen, “It’s worse than dog eat dog. It’s dog doesn’t return other dog’s phone calls.” That kind of environment doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be vicious in order to succeed. But if you want to make a great satire, you have to be unafraid of pissing off the PC crowd and a few idiot children now and again.
