Comedy hits the (dark) spot
Tropic Thunder
Directed by Ben Stiller
In theatres
****
I like my comedy black, the blacker the better.
Nasty, mean and as vicious as possible. That makes me laugh, and I understand that it may not appeal to you one bit, dear reader, but that is the beauty and often the challenge of comedy. We all like to laugh, but different things make us laugh.
Since the little old ladies killed men and buried them in their basement in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), black comedy has struggled to find its audience on film. Stanley Kubrick made likely the greatest black comedy of them all with Dr. Strangelove (1964) which turned nuclear war into comedy. That is the core of black comedy, to turn something generally considered a taboo topic into something funny. Some people feel a film like The Life of Brian (1979), which lampoons religion and Christ, is offensive, but I do not... period. The only type of film I find offensive is a bad one.
Tropic Thunder, a hysterically black comedy that has earned the wrath of several human rights groups (get over yourselves), does indeed poke fun at several different groups of people, but most of all makes vicious fun of the Hollywood machine and the actors, directors, producers and money people who are a part of that machine. Pretentious actors who believe they are artists, directors who feel they are creating art and producers who care only about the dollars are the real targets in the film, and writer-director-star Ben Stiller nails each attack with deadly precision.
Tugg Speedman (Stiller) has earned the wrath of his fans by making a weepy movie for the sole purpose of winning an Oscar and escaping his action film background. But it backfires on him and he is forced to seek another film that his fans will respond to. He chooses a war picture set in Vietnam in 1969 and heads into the jungle to make the movie, with his co-stars Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), a five-time Oscar winner known for going overboard in character, Alpa (Brando P. Jackson), a rapper making his mark in film and Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a comic with a series of gross-out films seeking some higher plane of art. The director is a goofy Brit portrayed brilliantly by Steve Coogan, who takes the production so far into the jungle the actors end up fighting a real war with a drug cartel who think the actors are real soldiers capable of fighting a real war.
Downey Jr. is astonishing as Lazarus, portraying a white actor who dyes his skin to portray a black man and spends all of his time deep in character. In a year that has seen Downey Jr. make a stunning comeback with Iron Man (2008), all that seems necessary to make this comeback a Cinderella story is an Oscar nomination which his work here deserves.
Black and Stiller are terrific, but the scene stealer here is Tom Cruise as a fat, balding executive who rants and raves about the sort of films that make money, his dialogue loaded with expletives and the sort of language that would make a trucker blush. Cruise is drop-dead brilliant in this small but crucial role.
The film is loud, vulgar, often offensive and altogether brilliant. I love it and cannot wait to see it again. This is take-no-prisoners comedy in which real risks are taken by the cast and director and writer. Thank God for us, they paid off... huge. This is among the best comedies I have seen in many years and it takes a great deal to make me laugh.
John Foote, director of the Toronto Film School, is a nationally known film historian/critic and a Port Perry resident. Get more reviews at www.footeonfilm.com. Contact him at jfoote@IAOD.com