Welcome to the jungle

Tropic Thunder
Review by Nathan Weinbender

You’ve no doubt heard the horror stories from the set of “Apocalypse Now.” Francis Ford Coppola’s epic about the horrors of war is one of the greatest American movies ever made, but he had a hell of a time getting it finished—star Martin Sheen nearly died of a heart attack, a typhoon destroyed the sets and filming rambled on for over two years as the budget ballooned uncontrollably.

Coppola himself suffered a nervous breakdown and threatened to commit suicide before the movie was completed. As he famously said of the production, “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”

“Tropic Thunder” is about the making of a film not dissimilar to “Apocalypse Now” (or “Platoon” or “The Deer Hunter,” for that matter), but what happens to the actors and director in this movie make the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the Coppola picture look like a walk in the park.

The temperamental director, played by Steve Coogan, is fed up with the pretensions of his actors and decides to abandon them in the jungle. In hopes of lending his Vietnam War film an air of realism, he sets up a series of hidden cameras to capture their every move. Unexpectedly, though, he ceases to be in the film’s funniest sight gag, and the actors end up battling a gang of drug smugglers led by a ten-year-old boy.

Of course, the self-absorbed actors are slow to realize that’s what going on around them is real and not a product of Hollywood hokum. Ben Stiller (who directed and co-wrote this film) is Tugg Speedman, the chucklehead action hero from the hit “Scorcher” series; Jack Black plays a heroin-addicted comedian named Jeff Portnoy, whose flatulent routines would make a gastroenterolist cringe. And Robert Downey Jr. is Kirk Lazarus, a lauded Australian method actor who has undergone a pigmentation process that allows him to convincingly play a hard-edged African American soldier.

Now, you may have heard that “Tropic Thunder” has stirred up controversy with advocacy groups across the country, and you probably thought it was due to Downey’s appearance in a more sophisticated form of blackface. No, the hullabaloo has been generated by a very minor element in the film, which involves Stiller’s character playing a mentally challenged man in a film called “Simple Jack.”

In one sequence, Stiller laments being overlooked for awards for playing such a demanding role, and Downey explains to him that his mistake was in “going full-on retard.” Remember Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” or Tom Hanks in “Forrest Gump?” Well, they won the Oscar, he says, because they played characters that were only “half-retard.”

It’s the use of the “R-word” that has people up in arms, and, on a basic level, I guess I can’t blame them. It’s a hateful, narrow-minded term, but the characters in “Tropic Thunder” that use it are hateful, narrow-minded people, and the word functions more as an illustration of their ignorance than it does as a joke. The Simple Jack character himself is not meant as an attack on mentally challenged people, but rather as an attack on actors who exploit people with disabilities in order to win acclaim.

Lazarus, the Downey Jr. character, serves the same purpose: How ironic that Hollywood would hire a white actor to play a black man when there are dozens of competent black actors working in Hollywood. And isn’t it strange how far some actors will go to completely immerse themselves in a role? It reminds me of Laurence Olivier’s advice to Dustin Hoffman, who, for a scene in “Marathon Man,” stayed up all night to appear physically exhausted on-camera: “Why not try acting? It’s much easier.”

But I suppose I’ve been tiptoeing around the real issue: Is “Tropic Thunder” funny? Yes, to a point. It has some truly big, inspired laughs in it, but there’s a lot of empty space in between them. This movie also has the same problem as last week’s “Pineapple Express”—the comedic material is mostly on-target, but the action material, which is much less interesting, eventually overtakes the film.

The picture works best, though, as a satire, a clever condemnation of common Hollywood practices that goes straight for the jugular. Movies like “Tropic Thunder” are what we call Equal Opportunity Offenders. It’s brash, crude, foul-mouthed and distasteful, and it gets its jollies from poking nearly every ethnicity and minority in the ribs with demented zeal. See, if you’re offending everybody at the same time, you won’t offend anybody at all.

Note: The movie’s biggest laughs come at the very beginning, opening with fake trailers, ala “Grindhouse,” that advertise the newest projects from the fake actors in the film. The funniest of the bunch is called “Satan’s Alley,” a sexually-charged melodrama about a homosexual relationship between two monks. Alert the Catholic League!

Grade: B

Directed by Ben Stiller. Written by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen. Starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Jay Baruchel, Brandon T. Jones, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise. R; 107m.