Will 'Chief Ron' be worth the gamble?

By Sarah Sluis

When I heard the plot line of Chief Ron, my initial reaction (that one you're supposed to either trust or ignore) was extreme wariness. A huckster, who doesn't "look" Indian, poses as a member of the Mohegan tribe in an attempt to start his own casino. What's funny is that it's based on a true story, in which a blond, blue-eyed Indian successfully won a court case that established his ancestry and allowed him to set up a casino, but in the comedy version, the guy will be a fake (at least until the third act, perhaps?).

Justin Theroux, who co-wrote Tropic Thunder (which you may remember for Robert Downey, Jr.'s blackface character) will direct from a script by Jordan Roberts (Around the Bend). I'm all about using comedy to explore the racial politics that underscore tribal casinos, but will a mainstream studio picture be able to effectively do this? The premise incorporates several hotly contested issues: blood quantum, or "how much" makes you a certain race, and the political rights of tribes governed as "domestic dependent nations" (which means independent, but not really). Will it be able to engage with these arguments, or merely bow to widely held stereotypes? As someone who has lived near Indian casinos and heard both sides of the debate, often phrased in racial terms, and studied under an indigenous rights scholar in college, I'm perhaps more sensitive to these issues than most people, but that doesn't mean these viewpoints should be ignored.

Looking at debates that occurred over Tropic Thunder last year (turns out the movie also got heat for making jokes about people with disabilities), the best I can hope for is that the film's treatment of these stereotypes will bring awareness to the political issues surrounding Native Americans, much like Downey's performance encouraged debates about black/white relations, as people argued about whether or not the jokes were offensive (even in the YouTube comments section!). Last year I saw the Tropic Thunder trailer several times in theatres, and there's a particular joke (at 2:00) that inspired a wave of shocked laughter: Downey, Jr (in blackface) taking offense to a perceived racial slight, saying, "What do you mean, you people?" followed by Alpa Cino (who is actually black) saying "What do you mean, you people?" The joke seemed to relax people into laughter, by implying that being sensitive to racial slights is actually more problematic. At least that's my reading of the joke.

Who knows how much of this subtext was in Tropic of Thunder's script, and how much was in Robert Downey, Jr.'s delivery? After all, he did receive an Oscar nomination for the astounding fact that he managed to play a role in blackface without totally misfiring. I can only hope that Chief Ron will be able to handle the political issues they got themselves into with the plot with sensitivity, and, most importantly, humor. If they fail at that, you can always rent Smoke Signals.