You know, I’m glad that disabilities rights activists are drawing attention to the “retard” scene in Tropic Thunder. It’s one of the funniest moments in the film, and what convinced me to go see it. Yes, I’m that guy.
Tropic Thunder is a movie of a lot of giggles and a few big laughs, but perhaps more than anything else, catharsis. It’s painful to sit through the end of the year Oscar season, when serious drama after serious drama comes out in an effort to throw a couple dozen performances at the wall and hopefully get some nods. It’s even worse to sit through a summer where you, at best, hope that the one or two non-sequels provide a respite from seeing the same actors do the same things over and over again. Thunder tackles this head on, not always in the funniest way, but consistently incisive enough that even when you’re not laughing, you can’t deny its truth.
Tropic Thunder is a movie about a movie within another movie. Briefest of plot synopses: the movie is a Vietnam War “go serious” vehicle for Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) and Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), all paired up with five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr., who makes this movie as much as he made Iron Man), a Russell Crowe method acting clone. As the movie goes off the rails, the director and producer decide that they’re going to make the movie by dropping the actors in the real jungle, and filming what happens - a Blair Witch Projectesque making the movie by having the actors not act.
Where the movie hits its mark is in the reaction of these acting archetypes to the uncontrolled environment they’ve been placed in - they’re in the midst of a massive heroin operation’s territory in Laos, with the realization dawning on some of them more slowly than others. Lazarus has undergone a procedure to darken his skin in order to look more authentically black, and his absolute refusal to break character, particularly with an actual black person standing right there, is as great an indictment of the overrated method acting process as anything I’ve ever seen. Speedman, undergoing a crisis of confidence, takes far longer than he reasonably should to realize what’s going on - not out of the banal stupidity that infects too many of Stiller’s characters, but out of a desire to figure out who he is and why he does what he does.
All of which, of course, leads to the retard scene.