Stiller Life

It’s not that I’ve never found Ben Stiller funny. I laughed at his psychotic fitness instructor in the camp comedy Heavy Weights. But that was in 1995, and I have to say that Stiller hasn’t done much for me since.

Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr, and Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder

You may disagree, in which case you are more likely to enjoy Tropic Thunder than did I, because it is nothing if not A Ben Stiller Film. He stars in it, directed it, co-wrote it (from an idea he claims to have been nurturing since 1987), and co-produced it, at a rumored cost of $90 million. Despite the massive explosions that the special effects budget was lavished on, though, it’s less a parody of war movies than a satire on Hollywood and the business of making movies.

This stuff, of course, is in Stiller’s blood. You can imagine him as a child at home with his parents, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, as they bitched about the lousy business they were in. I don’t know that they ever did bitch about work, of course—for all I know, they never had a single unpleasant moment in their 50-plus years in show business. But it’s fun to think of. (If you agree, check out a funny little movie from 2000 called The Independent, starring Jerry Stiller as a Roger Corman-ish director.)

But satirizing Hollywood is neither a terribly novel idea nor one that a lot of people really care all that much about. Sure, everyone enjoys Hollywood gossip and stories about the making of movies, but do you really care all that much? How many DVDs in your collection can you honestly say you’ve watched every special feature and listened to every commentary track? That’s time you could be spending watching other movies.

Tropic Thunder puts most of its money on screen in its opening scene, the intended climax of a megabudgeted Viet Nam epic starring past-his-peak action star Tug Speedman (Stiller). Picking the wrong moment to pitch a star fit, he ruins a take involving a massive explosion of napalm. But it’s a joke that’s ruined by the fact that Stiller the director/producer spent millions of dollars engineering the same explosion that is meant to be seen as a ridiculous waste of money.

After the studio threatens to cut off the production, director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan, who unfortunately is out of the script before he gets to contribute much) decides to go for real realism. This is as opposed to the fake realism of the opening scenes, which spew more blood and guts than the last Rambo movie. A not-very-convincing contrivance leaves the main cast members stranded in the jungle believing that they are being filmed by hidden cameras, while they are in reality being stalked by a group of drug-farming rebels.

Speedman’s co-stars are Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), an insecure comedian looking to go legit, and method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), an Australian who has had a surgical procedure to darken his skin so that he can play a black sergeant.

As you’ve doubtless read in a million places, Downey steals the show as an actor devoted to the point of idiocy. But like so much of the movie, the concept is cleverer than the execution, though it might have been funnier if Downey didn’t render so many of his lines through an unintelligible drawl. What makes the role truly funny is the relentless indignation of his co-star, an actual black actor (Brandon T. Jackson) who reasonably thinks that casting a white man as an African-American character is idiotic.

Tropic Thunder’s other showy performance is by Tom Cruise as studio executive Lee Grossman, who is bald, hairy, profane and aggressive. It’s a smart role for Cruise to take at a point in his career when an awful lot of people don’t think too highly of him: audiences that wouldn’t be willing to sympathize with him in a heroic role will be happy to accept him as an over-the-top asshole. But Stiller should have confined him to his one scene early in the film, because every time he comes back you start to notice how fake-looking his disguise is and how forced the performance is: less is always more. (As for Cruise’s dance scene under the end credits: there’s a cartoon in the current New Yorker showing a doctor busting some Elaine Benes moves while asking his patient, “Do you find it painful when I get funky?” I didn’t know that cartoonists got to see sneak previews of Hollywood movies!)

I got the most laughs out of Matthew McConaughey (of all people) as Speedman’s obsessive agent, and Nick Nolte as the Viet vet whose book is the basis for the film. And if you’re going to see this, be sure to arrive on time—you don’t want to miss the hilarious faux trailers that precede the movie. (Give a little consideration to what the title Satan’s Alley probably refers to. But not if you stopped at the concession stand for a Hershey’s bar).

I was sort of hoping that Tropic Thunder would be really bad, just so I could steal the title Mad magazine once used for its parody of Apocalypse Now—“A Crock of Shit Now.” Stiller’s movie has funny ideas, sure. He just can’t seem to tell the difference between those and the lousy ones, leaving you wanting more of the former and less of the latter.