FILM: Tropic Thunder – Fun but flabby, and eats itself

The late, late, Tropic Thunder review – possibly in time for a DVD release, and the bigger multiplexes. Much of the first third of Ben Stiller’s comedy is unnecessary, and seems to exist largely for Steve Coogan, who gets killed so early on he becomes irrelevant. Why not just dump the actors straight in their jungle nightmare and fill in the blanks with the odd bit of canny dialogue? The film opens in a jawdropping all-action style that it goes on to spoof – lightly at first, before eagerly employing so many of the genre’s trappings that it becomes what it mocks. The budget is colossal, and overshadows the conclusion – explosions, pitched battles and the machinations of a drug-farming child. Boys with toys and all too much, too big.

The middle section lives up to its promise; Robert Downey Jr in blackface is superb, and the racial sparring with his actually black co-star is underused – this is the only point at which the film tests its limits. The ‘retard’ aspect, represented by Stiller’s action hero’s failed Oscar bid (in the role of a Dr Dolittle farmhand called ‘Simple Jack‘), is a must for lovers of the politically incorrect but occasionally veers into the blunt unfunniness of such genre clonkers as Sports Movie, aka The Comebacks (a little better than Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, etc…praise so faint you need a microscope to see it).

As the jungle frenzy hits its stride with Stiller murdering an endangered animal, it is cut-off – too quick, too quick. An all too brief musing on the actor’s mask and some spectacular makeup is all that really follows. In the back of it all is Tom Cruise as a bald, evil movie mogul with enormous hands and a taste for salacious R&B. While often called a cameo, it is much more than that; a flat-out rendition of the sinister and the terrible, culminating in an extraordinary thru-credits dance sequence that mesmerises the mind. Cruise is no stranger to playing the unpleasant (see Magnolia), but that shouldn’t detract from his comedy tour-de-force here. It’s not enough to like it simply because it’s ‘bold’ for him not to play the hero; like it because he’s damn good at it. A shame that can’t be said for the rest of the movie.

Will Ferrell, as Two Face – he’s not fighting Batman, so is he half black?

Blackface really appears to be creeping back into acceptability. Will Ferrell has signed on for a comedy called Two Face, about a racist who ‘develops split personalities’. From a narrative point of view, this must surely involve him becoming black at some point. How else will he overcome his prejudice, but to take a walk in the shoes of that which he fears? Along with turns like Robert Downey Jr’s in the upcoming Tropic Thunder and Kevin Bishop blacking up for his new comedy series on Channel 4, has society become less sensitive to such things? It may just be a blip, like Soul Man and Short Circuit 2 in the 1980s (we’ve covered this before).

According to a recent report, white people seem to think everything is fine – whereas ethnic minorities regard themselves as being represented by stereotypes. The difficulty on both the big and small screens – but especially in the naturally melodramatic soap – is that, because of the low proportion of ethnic characters, they tend to take on all the storylines deemed ‘relevant’ to their skin colour by writers. Thus the same black woman will have several children by different fathers, suffer discrimination in the workplace and be viewed with suspicion by the police.

Handling all these race ‘issues’ under the hat of one character naturally creates a stereotype, but often through the best of intentions. The answer is just to cast people as people, and let the ‘issues’ drift over them – but the conventions of ‘addressing the audience’ on a mass market scale are such that this cannot happen without an angle. How will they understand it otherwise, reason executives. The problem is that our media doesn’t reflect real life, it only presents a slanted version of it – and perhaps if we stopped expecting to see reality in a box or on a wall, we’d all be a bit happier.

FILM: About face: Shades of grey in a black and white issue?

Is blackface becoming culturally, if not socially acceptable? Jack Black does it in Be Kind, Rewind, Robert Downey Jr is doing it in Tropic Thunder (see left, centre). Wind back to the 1980s, and Fisher Stevens pretended to be Indian in Short Circuit and its sequel, while C. Thomas Howell posed as a black student in Soul Man in the same year (1986), but there’s been a big, politically correct gap in between. (Some call it the 1990s.) Curiously no one seems to bat an eye, in the Western media, at least, about actors in ‘yellow face’ (the most hideous of which must easily be Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s), or the perma-tanned George Hamilton, or Chantelle Houghton bronzing themselves to within an inch of their lives. Where is the line between tanning and masquerading as a member of another race?

One wonders if, as we now have a black man as the arguable Democrat front runner (after Dennis Haysbert paved the way in 24), and ‘white face’ is not unheard of in black cinema, is ‘blacking up’ as sensitive an issue as it was in the dying days of the Black and White Minstrel Show? Easily the most offensive thing about White Chicks, the most prolific example of whiteface, is the complete absence of humour beyond a one-trick joke in what is ostensibly, a comedy (albeit a Wayans brothers one). But then, as a white correspondent, could I be missing the point? Humour is so subjective, after all. Would black audiences look at this and find it so absurd, it was somehow funny? The image of Robert Downey Jr as a black man prompts a similar reaction with your correspondent – and as long as both sides can have a more or less even crack at the genre, we’re happy.

Some might argue that Jesus was black (Madonna did it in Like A Prayer), in which case, every actor who’s portrayed him since was part of an unwitting white face conspiracy.

Robert Powell, 1972 = white face?
William ‘Willem’ Dafoe, 1988 = white face?
James Caviezel, 2004 = white face?

Add up those three years and divide by three, and the answer is = 1988. Clearly a sign that News Hour are on to something, and that Willem Dafoe may be at the centre of it all. Here is what the Wisconsin-born actor had to say about his performance:

“To this day, I can’t believe I was so brazen to think I could pull off the Jesus role.”

Says it all, really.