Black Like Downey: The Dark Overtones Of 'Tropic Thunder'
Unlike other, more culturally acceptable Hollywood race-swapping depictions—say, Rob Schneider's exciting work in the ugly-Asian-caricature arts, or even the Wayans brothers' attempt to slip into the alabaster skin of two chihuahua-toting cruise line heiresses—blackface steadfastly remains as reviled and controversial as ever. Which brings us, courtesy EW.com, to this first glimpse of Ben Stiller's "epic action comedy" Tropic Thunder—a movie he first conceived of as a young extra on the set of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. (Why does that one detail suggest what we might be looking at here is Stiller's own Heaven's Gate?) In it, Robert Downey Jr. plays an actor so committed to craft, he becomes African American:
Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam war epic ever filmed. Problem is, Lazarus's character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically.
'At the end of the day, it's always about how well you commit to the character,'' [Downey] says. ''I dove in with both feet. If I didn't feel it was morally sound, or that it would be easily misinterpreted that I'm just C. Thomas Howell in [Soul Man], I would've stayed home.''
Ignoring for a moment that cheap shot at Howell's fine work in one of the seminal minstrel comedies of the 1980s, we actually think we get what Downey is trying to say: Making blackface work is all about establishing that the actor's—or in this case, the actor within the actor's—intentions are true. Angelina Jolie's beafro'd depiction of the biracial Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, for example, received only positive notices. Even Jack Black, who plays a comedic actor in Tropic who insists on playing all the parts in his movies (see: Murphy, Eddie), dabbled recently in blackface in Be Kind Rewind—yet another tale of movies-within-movies that required of him to take on multiple roles. In that case, his own admirable commitment to sweding to the best of his ability, and his seeming obliviousness to the taboo, paid off in laughs. Downey should take note.
