Tropic Thunder

Saw Tropic Thunder, an ensemble comedy directed by Ben Stiller. It follows the filming of a doomed war film and so is half insider-Hollywood comedy and half straightforward action-comedy. It's mostly funny, although there were parts that fell a tad flat for me. I think this is a side-effect of seeing this while not surrounded by happy, laughing people, but Ben Stiller's main wellspring of comedy seems to be self delusion and I feel like some amount of self delusion is healthy (whatever happened to believing in yourself?) This is a minor thing however. For the most part the film is solid comedy.

There's an extended sequence in the middle where two actors have a Peter Sellers-esque crisis of personality. They're always pretending to be different people, competing with each other to more perfectly inhabit this character, so if their personalities are so fluid then who are they really? I think this sort of crisis is an occupational hazard of acting. In this case however, it's just an imitation of a breakdown which is lampshaded (he's got the tilt-stares!) and joked about. They're looking down this strange postmodern hall of mirrors and getting vertigo but they're also commenting on this and drawing us into it sort of. This postmodern posture of being a film and simultaneously commentating about films makes the handling of blackface in this film very tricky.

One of the actors within the film dyes his skin in order to play a black character. This is portrayed within the film as offensive and the actor's lazy stereotyping of how black people act is called out. However it's called out by a black rapper who sounds like Chris Rock and who I therefore suspect was the comic relief in the war film. So, it's only a joke. It was Obama-era America and racism was dead. Yeah, it's called out but that doesn't un-black the face. Smarter people than me have discussed this but it reminds me of the sexist-not-sexist film Suckerpunch. It's a fun enough movie but I think there's something distasteful about it. Maybe it was just after its time.

At any rate, this is a fun movie which comes with some unfortunate (and unfortunately interesting and discussable) baggage.