Kingsley Amis used to say that book covers should carry the author's year of birth so that he did not have to waste any time reading anything by a young person. In a similar way I have often thought that film classification should involve a maximum as well as a minimum recommended viewing age.
After all, who is more likely to be upset by violence - an octogenarian brought up in pre-Woy Jenkins gentility, or some 11-year-old who spends his evenings on computer games where the aim is to shoot strangers in leisure centres?
I thought about this while watching Tropic Thunder, a comedy I found hilarious but which contains jokes about genitals, backsides and Class-A drug abuse that will horrify or bore many people older than me.
The film title refers to a Vietnam war blockbuster in the making based on the memoirs of grizzled Vietnam vet "Four Leaf" Tayback (Nick Nolte). Supposed to be the biggest and most expensive war movie of all time, the film is falling apart because director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) cannot control his stellar cast's stellar egos. Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), a fading action film star whose attempt at winning credibility by playing a Forrest Gump-style "retard" has recently backfired, is bitterly jealous of co-star Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr), a ludicrous Australian method actor. Also along for the ride are low-brow comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), who has a heroin addiction, a rapper-turned-actor and a struggling young actor desperate for a break.
Lazarus is the best Hollywood parody in many years, a hard-living method-acting genius, part Heath Ledger and part Russell Crowe. Before the film proper starts we see a trailer for one of five films Lazarus is supposed to have won an Oscar for, a medieval take on Brokeback Mountain involving two gay Irish monks. Lazarus, we learn, has taken a role in Tropic because he is attracted to the role of African-American sergeant Lincoln Osiris, and thinks that playing a black man is the ultimate acting challenge, so much so that he has an operation to graft on afro hair and stays in character throughout, even as the film-within-the-film falls to pieces.
After a particular bad telling off by the studio boss, the director is in despair. "Four Leaf", clearly half-bonkers in a way that only Vietnam vets seem to be, suggests making the actors' emotions more "realistic" by throwing them into the real jungle and filming them guerrilla-style. (It also transpires that Four Leaf is not entirely honest about his time in the "Tropic Thunder" platoon, a swipe at the dubious memoir industry.)
And so they stumble into real danger in the form of heroin smugglers who believe they are from the Drug Enforcement Administration. Speedman finds himself a prisoner in a drug-processing camp, still under the impression that the cameras are rolling.
It might seem odd spoofing Vietnam films 20 years after Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July came out, and Stiller says he first had the idea while playing a small part in Empire of the Sun in 1987.
But Tropic Thunder is about the absurdity of the acting profession, which reaches unironically smug peaks when actors get together to make war films (especially pompous 'Nam films about "America's loss of innocence"). It mocks the fake boot camps, the pseud's talk about the "intensity" of war, and the way that the actors often go slightly mad during filming (the reality behind the making of Apocalypse Now is only mildly less absurd than Tropic Thunder).
Stiller, as a member of the Hollywood gentry (his parents are the comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara), is better placed than anyone else to mock the acting industry. But as a man, also, he has a wonderful insight into the absurdities of masculinity and machismo. |
