First things first. Let’s get this whole controversy bit out of the way. Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire, Tropic Thunder, has drawn the ire of a number of groups representing the mentally disabled. The offense is taken at a plot point which has Stiller’s Tugg Speedman, an action hero desperate to be taken seriously, playing a character in the mold of Sean Penn’s in I Am Sam. Speedman’s performance in this past role is a ridiculously offensive (if comically well-intentioned) caricature of a developmentally challenged adult. He and his co-stars on his current feature, a gritty Vietnam War flick, refer back to his performance as “Simple Jack” using the word “retard.” Seventeen times they use it, according to the also comically well-intentioned Timothy Shriver, who laments the frequent use of the “r-word” while the “n-word” is only used once. As if it might have been less egregious had there been more racial slurs.
Is it as offensive as they say? Of course not, but we’re sure the producers would like to thank the protesters—about a dozen of whom were out in front of the Gallery Place theater last night for the opening—for the extra publicity. What Shriver and the rest of the naysayers seem to be missing—if, that is, most of them even bothered to watch the film before passing judgement—is a fact that is central to what makes Tropic Thunder so gut-bustingly funny: each and every one of the leads is a self-centered, insensitive prima donna, and the laughs are not at the expense of anyone with a disability, but rather at those in Hollywood who crassly strategize that exploiting disabilities through tear-jerking films about them is a fast track to poignancy and golden statues. It’s a fine line to tread, but one that Stiller and co-writers Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen dance nimbly on for most of Thunder‘s fast-paced run.
The film, about a disparate group of actors brought together to make a glossy, pseudo-high minded war epic, sort of a Platoon crossed with Saving Private Ryan, opens brilliantly. Taking a page out of Grindhouse‘s book, a commercial and three fake trailers kick things off, telling the audience all it really needs to know about the leads via their previous work. Brandon T. Jackson is Alpa Chino, a rapper looking to break into acting, Jack Black parodies himself (and Eddie Murphy) as a fart-joke reliant fat comedian, Stiller is the aging action hero, and Robery Downey, Jr. a maddeningly pretentious Method actor so committed to living the character that he undergoes a medical skin pigmentation procedure in order to convincingly play a black man.
