When, in the clips from this fake movie, Simple Jack utters a line like, "It makes my eyes rain!" the joke isn't on the disabled.
They see themselves as craftsmen striving for authenticity in an artificial world - which is why Stiller's Tugg Speedman, an insecure mess, tried to bring a patina of class to his career by playing that simple-minded farm boy. The actors playing actors in "Tropic Thunder" needle one another, cajole one another, boost one another's confidence (even as they're backhandedly shooting it down).
KIRK LAZARUS MOVIE
Stiller and his gang happily take potshots at the war-is-hell realism of movies like "Saving Private Ryan" - the point being that movie realism may be dramatically effective, but it isn't in itself heroic. Another wounded guy pulls at his gut, and strings of noodly faux innards, slimy with tomato sauce, spill - and spill - into his hands. Nothing is sacred in "Tropic Thunder" - when a character, wounded in combat, wails, "I can't feel my legs!" the absurd predictability of the line practically brings down the house. In fact, it ceases being a production at all. From there, the production becomes nothing but chaos. So he leads his actors - including the deeply self-serious Australian Kirk Lazarus (Downey), the loose-cannon druggie Jeff Portnoy (Black) and the neurotic, pumped-up action guy Tugg Speedman (Stiller) - deep into the jungle to scare good performances out of them: Call it "The Blair Witch Project" approach, in which actors can't be trusted to actually act. The picture is off-schedule and over budget, the performers are messing up right and left, and Cockburn's ass is on the fryer. "Tropic Thunder" details the making of a picture touted as "the biggest war film ever," a Vietnam drama that's being filmed in Southeast Asia by a prestigious but less-than-competent director (his name, stupidly hilarious by itself, is Damien Cockburn, and he's played by Steve Coogan) and a cast of actors whose egos are as big as water tanks and as fragile as quails' eggs. But that doesn't diminish the fact - as "Tropic Thunder" so painfully reminds us - that "quality" movies are sometimes made by absolute assholes. Movies can elevate us, helping us locate the best, most generous parts of ourselves. The picture also questions the way we congratulate ourselves for our appreciation of serious pictures and dedicated performances, as if, by applauding their quality, we might somehow be connected with some greater good. "Tropic Thunder" is ridiculous and deeply enjoyable, but it also flashes a mercilessly polished mirror at the "prestige" products that the movie business so glibly feeds us in order to reflect glory back on itself. In the early '90s, when Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit photographs were causing a flap about the public funding of art, I recall seeing people wearing buttons decreeing, "Art can't hurt you." But if it can't cut into you, deeply or at all, what good is it? As much as we want our lives to be stable and manageable, comedy demands that we relinquish our sense of orderliness, sometimes even our better judgment.
Jackson in small but significant second-banana roles - understand that comedy is anarchy. But Stiller and his ensemble - which also includes Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. "Tropic Thunder" - which Stiller directed and, with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, co-wrote - doesn't risk simply offending at times the picture is almost appalling in its tastelessness - I watched parts of it agape. (The film actually uses the forbidden word "retarded.") Jack Black's character is the most wholesome of the three: He just plays a comic actor who has made a fortune out of donning fat suits and farting a lot.īut describing the characters so baldly removes them from their context, and in comedy, context is everything. Ben Stiller is a muscle-brained action star who, in a bid for Oscar attention, makes a picture called "Simple Jack," in which he plays a mentally challenged farm boy. plays an Australian actor so devoted to his craft that he undergoes a "pigmentation-alteration procedure" to play a black man. "Tropic Thunder" is an imperfect work of genius, a satire of Hollywood excess and vanity that dares to tread territory laden with minefields: Robert Downey Jr.