indefinite articles

You’ve experienced it before. The acting is broad and exaggerated. The situations are absurd, and keep getting more and more ridiculous. There’s a comedian in the lead role, so you look at the back of the DVD case to see whether the movie’s supposed to be filed under comedy. You start looking for things that are supposed to be jokes or gags, but they’re not there.

You’ve entered the world of the uncanny comedy. While some dark satires — Brazil, Southland Tales, anything authored by Bret Easton Ellis — may deliberately use the devices of an uncanny comedy for unsettling effect, and to lampoon social constructs and vices, other films fall into this universe unintentionally. Films like Gung Ho. Hudson Hawk. An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. And, perhaps, Tropic Thunder.

Even before its release, Tropic Thunder’s trailer has triggered a number of the annoyed or disturbed reactions people typically have to uncanny comedies. Confused brows have risen as crowds witnessed the curious, “is-this-offensive-or-not?” sight of Robert Downey Jr. playing an actor playing his role in blackface. A promotional website for a film-within-the-film, Simple Jack, in which Ben Stiller plays an actor playing a mentally disabled man, was pulled when disability-rights groups caught wind. Tabloids have been crushed under the legal muscle of Tom Cruise after they published less than flattering photos of him in a fat-suit and bald-wig preparing for his (uncredited) role in the film.

Fat suits, making light of the mentally handicapped, blackface. Can this actually end up being funny?

The issue vexing prognosticators is this: the film is supposed to be a film within the film, which has additional films within the film of actors who are playing different roles in each of the different films causing a sort of meta-trainwreck of intent. Stiller says, of the controversy around Simple Jack, that he’s lampooning a worthy target — pompous actors (say, Sean Penn in the likes of I Am Sam or Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain). Are Stiller, Black and Downey deft, hilarious actors in a good movie playing out-of-control, unfunny actors making bad decisions in a bad movie, or will the movie itself be out of control and unfunny?

Here’s the thing. The last movie to play the same game, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, was an execrable, unfunny, awful mess. The fact that Steve Coogan, the British actor playing the fake British director of the film within the American film Tropic Thunder looks more than a little like Eric Idle, who played the fake British director of the British film within the American film Alan Smithee, could make the casting choice either a hilarious send-up of the meta-lampoon genre — or it could just be a harbinger of very bad things to come. Sure, Ben Stiller’s no Joe Esterhaus — the reviled director of Smithee and writer of Showgirls — but this is a difficult comedic tightrope to walk, and Stiller’s never been known for his subtlety and nuance.

To be honest, I’m looking forward to it either way — whether I’m there to watch Stiller successfully skewer his pompous targets or to get covered in the film’s flop sweat, in the end, it certainly looks like something.