A group of self-absorbed actors set out to make the most expensive war film ever. After ballooning costs force the studio to cancel the movie, the frustrated director refuses to stop shooting, leading his cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they encounter real bad guys.
30 Nov Tropic Thunder (2008)
Three, Five, Eight
There seen to be only eight ways for humans to reference themselves. Only 5 are considered possible though I have encountered six I believe. Rarely, three are present here.
Robert Downey Jr is an actor on-screen. We never lose sight that it is he. He plays an Australian actor, loosely based on Heath Ledger. Postproduction took out some of the more obvious references to Ledger after his death and to point more to Russell Crowe, but it is clear that the transforms noted here are of the type encouraged in Australians and practiced in Batman.
That character, surgically transformed, plays an African American. But it doesn’t stop there. Like many black men, this one plays a character, a role. Some jokes with the “real” black man (who has done something similar) highlight this.
Since this inner, inner, inner, inner, inner man is self-consciously in a film, he mugs. That’s five layers of identity, three of them abstractions. No one alive today could pull this off I am sure. Depp probably when he was younger. A few actresses alive could, but even they have been lazy recently. So this is something of a special experience for me.
Stiller, who wrote this, creates a simpler set of folds for himself, just so that we don’t miss what this is all about. We will be aware of the by now common layering of writing, directing and starring, but Stiller is the first that I know to do it like Woody does, backwards, with the character creating the writer instead of the other way. Once in the movie proper, he adopts a role of a simpleton, something he is forced into but anchors the same way that Downey’s character to the fifth does.
The encounter between these two quantum logical persons isn’t written as cleverly as we wish how could it be?
As an incidental effect, Tom Cruise gives us a character that nearly redeems a career of energetic inadequacy. That alone might have been worth it, especially given the religious contexts. But Downey? A prince. A prince.
I had dinner with a regular reader last night. Here’s to him.
Posted in 2008
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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