“3% body fat. 1% brain activity.” That’s the tagline Paramount Pictures sold for Zoolander, and it’s an honest advertisement. Ben Stiller’s 2001 comedy is a satire of the fashion industry that runs 89 minutes. Derek Zoolander is VH1’s three-time male model of the year, a man whose face falls when hippie-chic Hansel scooters in to steal the award. The film is funny, thin, and occasionally sharper than it looks. It scores 61/100.
Trailer, via Paramount Movies.
Hansel and the walk-off
Zoolander opens in New York City with Derek at a low point. Hansel McDonald, played by Owen Wilson, has taken his crown. Then Derek’s roommates and colleagues Brint, Rufus and Meekus die in what the film calls a “freak gasoline-fight accident.” He retires, tries to reconnect with his southern New Jersey working-class relatives, and the family rejects him. That rejection is the movie’s best idea: the joke isn’t that modeling is silly, it’s that Derek has no life outside it.
Wilson was Stiller’s first choice for Hansel, though it was uncertain he’d be available and auditions were held. Jake Gyllenhaal auditioned. You can feel the luck in Wilson’s performance. Hansel is a rival who never quite becomes a villain, and the runway walk-off between the two — judged by David Bowie as himself — is the sequence the film is remembered for. Bowie filmed his cameo in September 2000 and said afterward, “It was just too funny a script to walk past. An absolute hoot!”
Mugatu’s conspiracy
The plot turns on a conspiracy, and it’s a well-designed one. Fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu, played by Will Ferrell, and Derek’s agent Maury Ballstein are charged by the fashion industry with finding a model who can be brainwashed into assassinating the new progressive-leaning Prime Minister of Malaysia. His policies would prohibit them from retaining cheap child labor in the country. Mugatu sees Derek’s confusing behavior at the awards ceremony and hires him — a model he had never worked with — to star in his next runway show. The conditioning works like this: Derek attempts the assassination when “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is played.
Ferrell plays Mugatu as pure id, and the film is better when he’s on screen. Andy Dick was going to play the role but was unavailable because of a commitment to the TV show Go Fish. Stiller had also intended to play Maury himself, but he was already starring and directing, so he cast his father, Jerry Stiller, instead. That’s a good trade. Jerry Stiller’s Maury is the film’s most relaxed presence.
Matilda and J.P. Prewett
Christine Taylor plays Matilda Jeffries, the journalist who wrote a scathing Time article about Derek and feels responsible for his downfall. She grows suspicious of Mugatu’s offer, tells Derek her concerns, and he ignores her. The film’s plot then detours into a cemetery, where Derek and Matilda meet former hand model J.P. Prewett, played by David Duchovny, who keeps his hand preserved in a glass container.
Prewett reveals that the fashion industry has been behind several of history’s political assassinations, including Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and that brainwashed models are killed soon after they finish the task. He says he was selected to assassinate Jimmy Carter. This is the movie’s satirical payload, and it lands partly because Duchovny plays it completely straight. James Marsden appears as John Wilkes Booth. The absurdity is the argument.
A runway full of cameos
The cast is deep in a way that now reads as a time capsule. Milla Jovovich plays Katinka. Jon Voight plays Derek’s father Larry. Judah Friedlander plays Scrappy. Alexander Skarsgård plays Meekus, one of the doomed roommates. Patton Oswalt plays the monkey photographer. Billy Zane cameos as a friend of Derek.
Then there’s the list of people playing themselves. Fashion’s own people showed up to be laughed at, which is a kind of endorsement. Here are the cameos worth naming first:
- David Bowie, as the judge of the walk-off.
- Billy Zane, as a friend of Derek.
- Donald Trump, as himself.
- Donatella Versace, as herself.
- Tommy Hilfiger, as himself.
The parade is the point.
What holds up and what doesn’t
Zoolander grew out of two short films directed by Russell Bates and written by Drake Sather and Ben Stiller for the VH1 Fashion Awards television specials in 1996 and 1997. You can see the seams. The feature has a sketch’s rhythm — a strong premise, a few great set pieces, and a middle that sags while it moves Derek from one room to the next.
The satire is less biting than it wants to be. The fashion industry here is a cabal of assassins, which is a bigger and sillier claim than the movie can support. The real target — the industry’s treatment of the people inside it — gets less attention than the walk-off gags. And the film’s treatment of its women is thin.
Still, the good parts are genuinely good. Stiller plays Derek without a wink, which is why the character survives. Ferrell’s Mugatu is a cartoon, but a committed one. The tagline is the whole movie in six words, and the movie knows it.
Paramount released Zoolander in theatres on September 28, 2001. It received generally positive reviews and was a box-office success, grossing $60.8 million against a $28 million budget. A sequel, Zoolander 2, followed in February 2016. An animated follow-up, Zoolander: Super Model, came to Netflix in the UK in August 2016.
Twenty-five years on, the original is a comedy with a real comic engine and a soft chassis. It’s worth the 89 minutes, and it’s worth remembering that the funniest thing in it is a man who cannot think. 61/100.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
