Tropic Thunder Starring Uncle Remus, I Mean Robert Downey Jr.

On Friday Tropic Thunder, the action-satire directed by Ben Stiller, opened in theaters.

Robert Downey Jr. stars in the film and plays Kirk Lazarus, an absurd method actor who undergoes skin pigmentation treatment to better portray a black man on screen.

My “Uncle Remus” Google Alert has been blowing up ever since.  From CNN, and echoed by a few others (1, 2):

“Downey’s blackface performance is an appalling mixture of Mr. T and Uncle Remus, but at the same time he endows the actor with enough straight critical intelligence to appreciate the severity of their situation.”

Downey’s character, Kirk Lazarus, creates a seemingly tough (like Mr. T) and sagacious (like Uncle Remus) onscreen persona.  But since Lazarus is method acting (and rarely shooting the movie-within-the-movie), he’s ridiculed for failing to stop acting like a black war hero when the cameras aren’t rolling.

So that part of the comparison is fair.  But it’s unfortunate that the CNN journalist ignores the intelligence of Uncle Remus.  No offense, Mr. T.

I doubt it was a choice–Uncle Remus is so often connoted as shuffling and dimwitted, no matter what was originally written.  It’s not unlike what’s happened to the connotation of “tar baby” recently.

When Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus stories in the late 19th Century, Remus was a significant departure from other black characters in popular fiction.  Uncle Remus was a philosopher revered by the author, not a minstrel presented only for cheap laughs.

In 1986 Ralph Ellison wrote:

“Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations.”

Reading about Uncle Remus in movie reviews, you’d have no idea what Ellison was talking about.

Film critics and historical characters aside, if you like extremely inappropriate jokes and meta-fictional hijinks (like the staff of the Wren’s Nest), Tropic Thunder is for you.