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August 21-27, 2008
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Thunder in the jungle
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
Barcelona gets a Woody
by Michael Phillips
Thunder in the jungle
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
My favorite gag in Tropic Thunder comes just before Tropic Thunder itself, in a movie trailer touting a fake movie called Satan’s Alley. (That’s an in-joke for all you Staying Alive freaks; Satan’s Alley was the Broadway musical John Travolta cavorted in.) The pretend drama, a kind of Brokeback Monk-Man, stars five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus as a tormented 18th century Irish priest who has big love for a fellow Man of God. Robert Downey Jr. plays Lazarus, and the wordlessly soulful goo-goo eyes he gives fellow sinner Tobey Maguire sets a high comic bar for Tropic Thunder to beat.
It doesn’t beat it, in fact. The first adjective that comes to mind regarding director and co-writer Ben Stiller’s comedy is “massive.” While the film is funny, too, its size and scale inform the joke half of the time and compete with it the other half. But its sharpest arrows take precise aim at a hornet’s nest of Hollywood egos.
Stiller, Downey and Jack Black play the leading actors stuck in a quagmire of a Vietnam War film, Tropic Thunder, based on the memoirs of “Four-Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte). The Vietnam veteran and the film’s hapless director (Steve Coogan) decide to break loose and “go native,” aided by the special-effects explosives expert (Danny McBride). For maximum realism they venture deep into the jungle. Then the local drug lords take notice of this apparent threat. The fake war movie becomes a real one, while back in Hollywood, studio chief Les Grossman (Tom Cruise, amusing in an uncredited supporting role and a good deal of artificial pudge) tries to work up some concern while openly relishing the danger, not to mention the potential box office.
Clueless, preening actors unaware of their situation: That’s the idea here. The gore is played for queasy laughs, as is, dubiously, the running gag about a film Stiller’s character is trying to put behind him, Simple Jack, about a mentally challenged farmhand. (The film’s “retard” references have led to a threatened boycott by various disabilities groups.)
When the film works, it’s less about strident outrageousness and more about wit, and finding the right way to twist the Platoon and Apocalypse Now clichés into pretzels. My second-favorite sight gag involves Stiller’s action-hero character, Tugg Speedman, rescuing what he assumes will be a grateful war orphan. But the steadiest supplier of laughs is Downey, who’s playing a Serious Actor maniacally committed to his craft. How committed? He undergoes a controversial skin treatment to render him
African-American in appearance so he can play the black platoon sergeant, thereby relegating the cast’s actual African-American (Brandon T. Jackson) to a secondary role. I think we can agree that blackface humor is dicey humor. For it to be humor at all is an accomplishment. Fresh off Iron Man and looking like Fred Williamson in his Inglorious Bastards heyday, burying a Russell Crowe dialect deep inside the character voice he’s developed for badassss Sgt. Osiris, Downey makes the conceit work because he’s constantly trying to make two portrayals work, in tandem.
In the end Tropic Thunder is an expensive goof about an expensive goof, and the results are very impressive and fancy-looking. (John Toll shot it; he was the director of photography on The Thin Red Line, among other epics.) Too impressive, really, to fully unleash the humor in the situations. Here’s the litmus test: If you smile at the wild-eyed pose Downey strikes in the poster for Tropic Thunder, you’ll probably get your nine bucks’ worth.
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Barcelona gets a Woody
by Michael Phillips
It took a screenplay set among Americans in Spain for Woody Allen to make his most French film yet. Vicky Cristina Barcelona plays like a conscious attempt at a freewheeling artifact of the French New Wave, particularly Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, with its sexual triangulations and hard-won romantic wisdom. Allen’s film can’t really withstand such comparisons; it’s extremely modest, and besides, when Allen does “freewheeling” it can’t help but come off a bit studied.
Yet I enjoyed it as much as any Allen film of the last 20 years. When it’s over, and the two Americans at the heart of the story depart Barcelona in overlapping states of confusion, you’re left with a tinge of melancholy that feels not plot-driven, not engineered, but like a slice of reasonably complicated life.
Allen shoots on location in Barcelona, Oviedo and other locales, while peering in on the love lives of two American women in their 20s. Scarlett Johansson plays Cristina, the reckless one. As the unseen and very busy narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) informs us, her suffering is “an inevitable component” of any relationship. She is one of Allen’s vaguely frustrated women searching for a meaningful creative outlet and has come to Barcelona (guests of friends of the family, played by Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn) arm-in-arm with sensible, skeptical, engaged-to-be-married Vicky, played by Rebecca Hall. More on her later: She’s a major screen actress in the making.
Seemingly 10 minutes after unpacking, the ladies run into Javier Bardem, whose smooth-talking yet attractively tormented artist offers to show these two a very good time. (You can tell he’s trouble because he wears a crimson-red shirt.) Before long one of the women falls for him, then the other, and then onto the scene pops Penelope Cruz, as Bardem’s outrageously clichéd, insanely jealous ex-wife.
Allen could’ve played this for door-slamming, flamenco-accented farce, and hints of that come through in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But the writer-director lets this story and these characters breathe a little. The comic and dramatic threads complement each other, even if the narration lays everything out with a trowel. It’s hard to believe Allen couldn’t come up with more interesting and less literal-minded observations than: “Life continued predictably for Vicky and Doug (her fiancé) — until an unpredictable moment occurred.” Or this, accompanying a tour of an art museum: “They particularly enjoyed the works of Gaudi and Miro.”
Lines like that are just furniture, and it’s too bad Allen falls into the old trap of painting characters like Vicky’s nudnik fiancé (Chris Messina) as a nudnik simply because he’s into golf and finance. He does, however, take an unusually forgiving stance with each of the major players in his little comedy-drama. And with Hall’s Vicky, the film acquires real emotional force. Hall didn’t even make the poster, which depicts Bardem, Cruz and Johansson, but she’s the heart of the film. As Vicky finds herself in various conflicted states — drawn to the Spanish rake, obligated to her dullish intended, scolding of Cristina yet envious — Hall rivets your attention. Like Kate Winslet, she’s a fabulous reactor and inter-actor. The same can’t be said of Johannson, who has her appeal (duh), but it’s more about hitting a single note, hard, rather than blending a few.
At its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May Vicky Cristina Barcelona was greeted with a weird sort of nervous, nonstop laughter. At a recent Chicago press screening the response was more subdued but, I suspect, more attentive and attuned to the film itself. Don’t expect the world or a million laughs or even gorgeous Spanish scenery from this conventionally made picture. But don’t underestimate its ability to charm either.
—MCT
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