Gateway Cinephiles

Tropic Thunder
2008 (USA / Germany)
Director: Ben Stiller
Viewed: September 12, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

B - Hollywood is a tempting target for satire. The angles of attack are multitude: the self-importance, the artificiality, the artlessness, the clueless insularity, the inhuman ruthlessness. Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder tackles them all. It pounces with slavering gusto on every opportunity for vicious mockery, strafing Tinseltown with both barrels. It’s definitely funny, but not the sort of comedy that had me laughing beginning to end. Instead it inspired a state of disbelief, gaping amusement, and squirming embarrassment. In its best moments, Thunder calls to mind the lunatic highs of Mel Brook’s oeuvre. That said, the film is far too conventional in some respects, and too sublimely bizarre in others to be mistaken for any kind of comic masterwork. Yet despite some misfires in the performances and script, the sheer chutzpah of the enterprise and Stiller’s unexpected flashes of comic madness render it a thing to behold. Neither mercy nor tact are in its arsenal, and thank God for that.

Stiller and co-writers Justin “This Is the Girl” Theroux and Etan Cohen open Tropic Thunder with an inspired and cunning sequence, using commercials and trailers to introduce the main characters. Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a hip-hop artist who has made a fortune peddling his own brand of energy drinks and bars. Lowbrow physical comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is starring in a sequel to his flatulence-rich gross-out hit, The Fatties. Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an award-showered Aussie Method actor appearing in a prestige drama about homosexual priests. And finally Tugg Speedman (a well-muscled and -oiled Stiller) is launching the latest sequel in his apocalyptic action franchise, Scorcher VI.

These fake ads set the refreshingly original tone for the rest of the film. Thunder doesn’t occupy itself with wisecracks or dry observations. Rather, it replicates the ludicrous qualities of the real world and adds half a twist of bonus stupidity. We’re prompted to loathe the characters of Thunder based solely on small glimpses of their output. However, the ads are also aimed squarely at the audience’s own pop cultural preferences. The satire doesn’t truly sting unless you’ve paid good money to see similar garbage. It’s a risky tactic; no one likes to be called an idiot, even by implication. Stiller keeps us on his side by conveying a sense of shared misery. The director, after all, has produced his share of crap, as have his performers. In keeping with Thunder’s Vietnam War film-within-the-film, Stiller establishes a bitter camaraderie with his audience, capped with a sheepish grin: “Can you believe we made it through nightmares like If Lucy Fell and Mystery Men?”

Thunder’s plot is the stuff of numerous screwball comedies-of-error, albeit ratcheted up with admirably realized corporate movie-making freneticism and dollops of pure weirdness. The aforementioned film-within-the-film, also titled Tropic Thunder, is a Very Serious War Picture. Shooting on location in Vietnam, the production is rapidly spiraling out of control. Over budget and behind schedule, novice director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is out of his league juggling his stars’ inflated egos and demands. Black is a barely controllable heroin addict. Stiller is trying to leap out of his action flick rut, having failed with a disastrous bit of Oscar-bait titled Simple Jack. (His mistake? Like Sean Penn in I Am Sam, he went “full retard.”) Downey has medically darkened his skin to play the film’s black sergeant, much to Jackson’s consternation, and refuses to break character at any time. Hovering over Coogan’s shoulder via satellite is monstrous producer Les Grossman (a hirsute, balding Tom Cruise), who breathes in air and exhales venomous insults and violent threats.

Lurking around the set is Four-Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte, grizzled and hook-handed), whose war memoir, also titled Tropic Thunder, serves as the basis for the film. Nolte recommends that Coogan break the actors out of their comfort zones by putting them “in the shit,” as the vets say. The director eagerly pursues this notion, dropping his pampered cast in the jungle and resolving to shoot the rest of the film “guerrilla style” with minimal crew. Things go off the rails almost instantly, with Stiller and his fellow actors blundering into the clutches of opium growers. Suffice to say that the story functions mostly to establish that Stiller and company are complete fools, although—since this isn’t completely pitch black comedy—their foolishness arguably saves them by the end.

Tropic Thunder isn’t particularly funny or insightful when it relies on one-note gags or hackneyed reversals of expectations. You know the drill. The devoted Method thespian is in the throes of an identity crisis. The hip-hop star with the ultra-heterosexual partier persona is actually a sensitive gay wannabe actor. You can practically hear Stiller and Theroux tittering: We can gets some gags out of that, right? For all of Stiller’s enviable precision when he aims at the institutional absurdities of Hollywood, there are still some unfortunate miscalculations. Cruise’s producer is exquisitely malevolent, and he chews on the vulgarity with roaring relish. (I could have listened to him berate his underlings all night.) Yet Stiller seems to think that a puffy Cruise dancing to hip-hop is hilarious, when in reality it’s just odd. The worst offender is Black, who is sadly miscast and grating. His manic “Cuckoo for Smack” routine lacks the wounded adolescent strut that made The School of Rock and Kung Fu Panda such delights, and all that’s left is a bug-eyed caricature of addiction.

When Tropic Thunder succeeds, however, it succeeds marvelously. Satirizing the film industry is its primary mission, and in this it is absolutely savage. No one escapes its wrath: actors, directors, producers, writers, agents, or assistants. Even the pyrotechnics technician is portrayed as a clown. Most importantly, Stiller gets both the broad strokes and the details exactly right. Consider the portrayal of Stiller’s agent, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey). There’s the slick, unimaginative nicknames he spouts (”Tuggster!”); the way he proudly relishes his client’s panda-rescue charity ad in Vanity Fair (back cover!); the fact that he plays Wii Tennis while talking on his Bluetooth headset, for Chrissake. It’s ludicrous, but also creepily plausible. Thunder exhibits the sort of meticulous, dead-on writing and production design that betrays both an affection and a burning hatred for Hollywood.

Thunder also features glimmers of unexpected goofiness that borders on inspired lunacy. Indeed, it’s the little things from this film that stick with me and bring a smile to my face, and most of these moments involve Stiller. I’ve never had any particular affection for him as a comedic actor, and here he spends too much screen time mired in a fruitless, Martin Sheen send-up. Yet I can’t deny the dabs of crackpot strangeness that he adds to the film. Lost in the jungle with only his video iPod, he raptly watches Captain Kirk tussle with a rubber-suited alien. A lesser comedy would have harped on his affection for Star Trek in the script; instead Stiller slides in this revealing character detail via a sight gag. There’s the shock and then hilarious horror when an animal attack has an unthinkable outcome. There’s the wide-eyed way he murmurs the line, “You’ve got the VHS?” And there’s the utterly demented sight of a baby repeatedly stabbing Stiller in the back with a knife. The moment is a personal favorite from the film, one that illustrates just how wonderfully nasty and unexpected Tropic Thunder can be. Consider yourself advised, soldier.

Frozen River
2008 (USA)
Director: Courtney Hunt
Screened: September 2, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

B - Frozen River is a tale of dreams, or at least what passes for dreams in the bitter winters of far-upstate New York. The film presents us with two women, each a quintessential American survivor in their way. Ray (Melissa Leo) is a white, middle-aged single mom, scraping together a life for her two boys in a cramped manufactured home. Lila (Misty Upham) is a younger Mohawk woman, and also a mother, although her infant son has been wrested from her with the tacit consent of her tribe. When fate brings these two women together, their antagonism seethes, but eventually they embark on a perilous criminal collaboration. First-time director Courtney Hunt’s naturalistic story of slush-and-mud desperation on the margins of the American dream is an affecting and uncommonly sensitive depiction of foolish risks taken for all the right reasons.

When Frozen River opens, Ray’s husband has recently vanished with the funds that were supposed to secure their new double-wide. Eventually we learn that he is a gambling addict who has pulled such disappearing acts before. This might be the final act. Ray repeatedly checks her phone messages in search of some sign from him. The absent man of the house is often the subject of arguments between Ray and her teenage son T.J. (Charlie McDermott), their quarrels masking a shared understanding that he was a lousy husband and father. With Ray’s job in a sad little retail store as the only source of income, the family is teetering on the edge of poverty. The dream of the double-wide is evaporating, the repo men are coming for the television, and meals before paydays consist of popcorn and Tang.

Ray eventually finds her husband’s car; the husband is gone, but Lila is behind the wheel. The Mohawk woman is reticent, unwilling to explain herself: “I found it,” she shrugs, “The keys were in it.” A widow who works in the tribe’s dingy bingo parlor, Lila has bad eyesight, a freezing little trailer—Ray’s house is extravagant by comparison—and a son who seems to have been kidnapped by her mother-in-law. (”Tribal police don’t get involved in that stuff,” she explains.) She is also an aspiring smuggler of human cargo: Asian immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. from Canada. The Mohawk reservation straddles the border, rendering it an ideal conduit for trafficking when the river freezes. Unfortunately, Lila lacks a car with a spacious trunk, as well as the skin color that would permit her to pass the state troopers unmolested. As it happens, Ray needs cash for a down payment on the new house, a tantalizing prize that represents a better life for her family. The two work out an arrangement; Ray provides the transportation, Lila the connection. From the beginning, however it’s an alliance fraught with tension and calamity. More than that I won’t say.

Frozen River possesses a suffocating realism, a sensation partly established by its dismal landscape of white snow, slate sky, and rusting metal. Mostly, however, it emerges from Hunt’s deep adoration for Leo and Upham’s faces, which she frequently shoots in tight close-ups. Leo’s outstanding performance resides deep in her eyes, lined with crow’s feet and dollar-store mascara. They glint with the same contradictory hues that were in evidence in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: despair, warmth, exhaustion, bitterness, and strutting decisiveness. It’s such an authentic performance, it almost feel voyeuristic to watch her doing mundane things like preparing for work or broodingly smoking a cigarette.

Upham’s smooth, cherubic face is more inscrutable, but her eyes have a squinting moistness that hints at her painful past and frayed sense of self. She doesn’t make excuses for her misdeeds, and yet she seems acutely aware of how shabby and sad her life must seem. Many in the tribe treat her with contempt, as though she were some sort of untouchable, and not merely because her illicit side business is an open secret. (A native used car dealer refuses to sell her a vehicle with a trunk; he knows what use she has for it.) There seems to be ugly history there that is never revealed. Lila appears prepared to turn her back on the reservation, but her son keeps her there. She watches him from a distance and sneaks him money in potato chip cans.

Both Lila and Ray exhibit different kinds of defiance: the native woman a quiet apathy and intensely lonely longing; the white woman a scrabbling desperation and sarcastic tongue. Both of these people flare to life when out on smuggling runs. They become bolder and tougher, crackling with wariness. Both are in denial about what they are up to. Ray insists that she is “no criminal.” Lila declares that their little enterprise isn’t a crime at all, just “free trade between free people.” And we believe them, in a way. Smuggling isn’t a lifestyle or a thrill for these women, but a means to realize their dreams, no matter how small or simple they might seem to an outsider.

Implausibilities are scattered through Frozen River, mostly in the form of character reversals that don’t ring quite true. While the film boasts an icy, anguished sense of lurking doom, it also suffers from a kind of lazy tidiness. Ray emphatically warns T.J. not to tinker with a propane torch, so of course he disobeys—for all the right reasons—and ignites a near-catastrophe. Of course the state trooper that sets Ray on edge at the store turns up later to question her, and of course this is the same trooper that pursues her during a botched smuggling run. Hunt’s tone suggests that something momentous, even disastrous, will happen before the credits roll, but her storytelling style leaves little doubt that all will be resolved, one way or another. The suspicious smoothness in its narrative cogs notwithstanding, Frozen River’s conclusion is touched with grace and fragile promise. The film’s final scene involves a carousel, a family, and a glimmer of hope. Or at least what passes for such things in America.

Transsiberian
2008 (UK / Germany / Spain / Lithuania)
Director: Brad Anderson
Viewed: August 31, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

C - Allow me to clear up one thing that the marketing of Transsiberian has unforgivably muddled: Woody Harrelson might have first billing, but Emily Mortimer is the clear protagonist and the star of this serviceable—albeit raw-nerved—thriller. Director Brad Anderson begins with a meaty premise: two guileless Americans find themselves enmeshed in a heroin trafficking plot during their journey aboard the titular train. This is not a Locked Room mystery in the tradition of Murder of the Orient Express. Jessie (Mortimer) and Roy (Harrelson) spend as much time off the train as on it, and the film clearly owes a debt to Hitchcock’s more harried, dashing thrillers in its action set pieces and its fascination with Jessie’s responses to desperate, often uncanny, circumstances. Unfortunately, Anderson lends barely any thematic heft to the tale. While Jessie’s plight often has us sweating bullets in the moment, Transsiberian’s themes are confused, when the film-makers bother to articulate them at all. The result is a film that offers excitement and opportunities for “What Would You Do?” speculation, but little else.

In a era when thrillers so often rely on characters that are not what they seem, Transsiberian is bracingly straightforward in setting up its conflicts and twists. If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know the nickel version. Roy and Jessie are making an adventure of their return from a missionary trip in China by taking a train to Moscow. Roy is a good-natured but clueless schmuck, a variation on the bartender that established Harrelson’s career, only without the sheepish humor. Jessie is the anxious dreamer, but with a wild past and a schizophrenic demeanor that permits Mortimer–who was all rural Minnesota sweetness in Lars and the Real Girl–to play against type a little. Sharing the couple’s sleeping car is a pair far more acclimated to the perils of third-class world travel. Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) is a smooth Spanish bullshitter with an unseemly eye for Jessie, while Abby (Kate Mara) is an American girl from the wrong side of the tracks, all heavy eyeliner and furtive glances. The wild card is Grinko (Ben Kingsley), a dour Russian narcotics officer who is both maddeningly cunning and blatantly corrupt.

The plot is Transsiberian’s raison d’être, so I won’t say much more about it. There are harrowing acts of violence, a suitcase full of heroin that doesn’t look like heroin, and lots and lots of deception and track-covering, particularly on Mortimer’s part. Anderson’s story and construction aren’t stunningly original, but neither are they distractingly clichéd. The film borrows snippets from familiar thriller scenarios, cobbling them together into an contraption engineered to evoke cold-sweat tension. Guilt and suspicion are the currency of the script by Anderson and Will Conroy, and also the cornerstones of the film’s most effective scenes. One of the more chilling moments involves a character browsing through pictures on a digital camera, where one particular image lurks like a tell-tale heart.

Harrelson is utterly and deliberately off-putting as Roy, an aw-shucks dimwit whose determination to do the right thing doesn’t mitigate his jerk streak or his obliviousness to his spouse. (More than once, Mortimer pops in, panting and tearful, and Harrelson wonders, “Is something wrong?”) Harrelson is actually a comfortable fit for the character, and does a passable job with the portrayal. However, the film has no use for him other than as ballast and to provide manly decisiveness at a couple of key moments. (Sexism much?) It’s Mortimer’s burden to hold our attention, and that she does quite well. She presents Jessie as a woman mired in a furrowed adolescent aimlessness after years of risky living. Her actions seem a little bewildering at times, but they’re ultimately reconcilable with her twinned personality, part reckless ferocity and part impotent despair. The duller examples of the thriller genre depend on characters that behave in a relentlessly stupid manner. In contrast, Transsiberian’s events tighten with exhausting tension around Mortimer due to to a couple of stupid mistakes. No honest person would deny suffering similar (or worse) lapses in judgment. Kingsley’s Detective Grinko echoes the sly, relentless qualities of an older stripe of American gumshoe, even as he embodies a distinct post-Soviet gangster-cop archetype. It’s a performance delivered from a hammy, eminently watchable stance, which serves Transsiberian’s need for a menacing villain nicely.

Which brings us to the film’s primary flaw: the sheer functionality of the whole enterprise. The film is exactly what it appears to be, no more, no less. Dark, violent, and ultimately forgettable, it’s the stuff of enjoyable entertainment, but not necessarily stirring cinema. That’s not to say that Transsiberian feels tossed-off, at least as a thriller. Its hunger for squirming viewers is palpable, and Anderson realizes the genre’s components with a enviable skill and ruthlessness. In contrast, the director tends to lose his way when he gestures hazily towards themes such as the persistence of personal demons and the limits of compassion. These currents are presented with a kind of dreary half-heartedness. Furthermore, there’s a muddled quality to the film’s moral conception of Jessie: Is her subsumed assertiveness responsible for her plight, or is it the only thing that saves her hash? With one hand Anderson despairs over the unforeseen costs of deception, and with the other he promotes the virtues of noble lies. Transsiberian would have been better if it eschewed the awkward, mushy moral lessons and maintained a sharp focus on its principal strength. Namely, its visceral portrayal of a woman’s grueling crawl through a waking nightmare.