McConaugheMay Day 25: Tropic Thunder
All in all, I was leery about whether this 2008 action comedy would hold up. The 2000s were, as I’ve often noted, an incredibly offensive decade of cinema; toward women, toward people of color, toward queer people, toward just about anyone who didn’t fit the exact right white man of a certain age. I remembered loving this movie when it came out, but over a decade later, would I still find it funny?
As it turns out, the answer is yes. This is a movie made by actors with enough self-awareness to know that they lead silly and largely selfish lives but not enough to fully escape that mindset. They can make themselves the butt of the joke just so long as you know that they know that they’re allowing you to laugh. It’s a tightrope to walk, and one that I was really surprised that director and star Ben Stiller was able to nail. Even the most on-its-face offensive joke, Robert Downey Jr.’s character dying his skin black in order to play a Black man in the movie-within-the-movie is deeply clear-eyed about what the joke actually is. It’s never funny because someone’s doing Blackface—it’s funny because RDJ’s character is so obsessed with getting an Oscar award and validating his own existence that he can’t even imagine having the sense of self to know that what he’s doing is a bad idea. One meta joke I haven’t seen acknowledged is that the “Black voice” he puts on has to be an homage to his dad dubbing over the lead in Putney Swope since it sounds identical.
Outside of that, the jokes are constant and often hilarious, trading on both the inside baseball of big budget filmmaking and scope and also offering the simple slapstick pleasures of watching dumb people hurt themselves in dumb ways. The cast is absolutely stacked with talent; Danny McBride steals the show as a shockingly competent explosives expert, Jack Black goes all in as a drug-addled narcissistic comedy star, and Ben Stiller manages to make his character absurd, and absurdly funny, all at the same time. It’s frankly a miracle that this movie holds up at all considering the nonstop barrage of jokes, but it’s always clear-eyed about who’s being mocked, and it makes the comedy feel warm and welcoming instead of exclusionary.
In this movie, Matthew McConaughey plays basically himself in a movie about actors confused between the levels of reality between their performance as a performance in a performance about a performance. What role of his is the true one? When does he "take off the cape" and stop having to be "the hero who you thought he'd be (but he's still teaching you how to be a better man)?"
How can we find this? Judge based on hair length? On tone of voice? Is his restrained less Texan accent the real one or is his real one really that thick? Does he even know anymore?
The other day someone who'd known me for a decade told me stop doing the "McConaughey voice" and I didn't know what she meant. I think I'm forgetting what my own voice sounds like.
His audio-book is pretty good.