Movie Review | 'Zoolander'
A Lost Boy in a Plot to Keep the Fashion Industry Afloat
By ELVIS MITCHELL
Published: September 28, 2001
An evil band of international fashion designers want to end the tenure of a new prime minister of Malaysia, who plans to stop the exploitation of child labor. (The designers are all sitting in the shadows so they can't be identified, even though one is clearly meant to suggest Karl Lagerfeld, who looks like a supervillain from a Bond movie, anyway.)
They force their subaltern Mugatu (Will Ferrell), who has compulsively stamped his brand on everything, to find a supermodel pawn to assassinate the beloved Malaysian ruler. "Fabio?" someone says. "Too smart." There's only one blunt instrument suited to this job: the dumb and monumentally earnest Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller), the star and unfortunate potential hero of the often unspeakably funny new comedy "Zoolander."
Derek has just been unseated as the world's best male model by Hansel (Owen Wilson, whose oblivious stoner's arrogance is a perfect attitude for a head-of-clay model). Before Mugatu subjects Derek to brainwashing (a hilarious tribute to "The Manchurian Candidate"), this dejected haute couture mannequin returns to his coal-mining hometown, where his father (Jon Voight) and brothers all have the same suede hair and mouth-breathers' countenances.
Zoolander is a lost boy who doesn't understand that what he perceives to be his arsenal of looks, from the lesser "Le Tigre" to the show-stopper "Blue Steel," is all the same expression, a combination of wounded, intense and determined to remember where he put his car keys. (Off the runway, Derek's brow is constantly twisted with confusion over concepts like keys.)
The outlandish freak Mugatu, with his white marceled miscreant hairdo, erupts in continual spasms of anger. He's like a 4- year-old whose every movement is some form of acting out, and Mr. Ferrell's commitment to Mugatu's perpetual tantrum- hurling is a blessing. Mr. Stiller enjoys the humor quotient in guys' childish behavior and uses the Time magazine reporter (Christine Taylor) following Derek as a common-sense figure and female audience surrogate, as well as a plot motor.
Even Derek's agent, Maury Ballstein (Jerry Stiller, Ben Stiller's dad), is all baby- boy appetite; with his dyed-brunet pompadour and snow-white chest hair, Maury is like a factory-defect version of an aging macher. ("Zoolander" is a family affair: Ms. Taylor is the younger Mr. Stiller's wife, and his mother, Anne Meara, and sister, Amy Stiller, are seen in cameos.)
A survey of Ben Stiller's career in comedy, going all the way back to his MTV series, indicates that he has a scorched- earth approach. He understands how pop culture has infantilized those who worship it. (He is probably amused by how much of a fashion victim he is in real life. Even as the rabbi in last year's mild comedy "Keeping the Faith," he was done up in head-to-toe Prada; evidently his congregation took really good care of him.)
"Zoolander," which he directed (he also wrote the screenplay, with Drake Sather and John Hamburg), is a gleaming fashion- world tour, with cameos by Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger and Tyson Beckford as Derek's cut-man during a battle between Derek and Hansel that has to be seen: it ends with a remix of shtick right out of the Borscht Belt. It makes sense that "Zoolander" would have the stylish, high-resolution glaze of a fashion shoot. Mr. Stiller has also crammed the movie with energy; it seems still to be bouncing on the screen long after it has run its 89-minute course.
The fun comes from how seamlessly Mr. Stiller blends everything together. He aligns "The Manchurian Candidate" (the espionage aspect of "Zoolander" includes the best makeup joke in years) and an attempt to address politics with a blistering send-up of pop culture.
Mr. Stiller is hooked on Americans' mindless obeisance to a popular culture that corrupts everything it touches and never stops taking itself seriously; this is the real challenge for a man who created a faux Lucky Charms commercial with the band U2 for his old show on Fox.
"Zoolander" comes from a character Mr. Stiller and Mr. Sather invented for a sketch on the 1996 VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards, and no situation cried out for savage parody more than that awards presentation. It's slightly disturbing to see VH1 credited as a producing partner; the company probably owns the character, since it was done for a VH1 show, but this spectacle is not unlike having the Hormel company sponsoring a dramatization of Swift's "Modest Proposal." (Oddly enough, one of Hormel's subsidiaries is called Swift.)
What may be more troubling is the assassination subplot (the central idea is that fashion has used models as assassins for centuries), a reminder of the atmosphere in this country after the terrorist strikes into the heart of America.
"Zoolander" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for strong language, sexual content that includes a freakazoid orgy that ends in true love, and Hansel's encyclopedic drug references.
Directed by Ben Stiller; written by Drake Sather, Ben Stiller and John Hamburg, based on a story by Mr. Sather and Mr. Stiller; director of photography, Barry Peterson; edited by Greg Hayden; music by David Arnold; production designer, Robin Standefer; produced by Scott Rudin, Mr. Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 89 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
WITH: Ben Stiller (Derek Zoolander), Owen Wilson (Hansel), Will Ferrell (Mugatu), Christine Taylor (Matilda), Milla Jovovich (Katinka), Jerry Stiller (Maury Ballstein) and Jon Voight (Larry Zoolander).