THE TALL GUY

CAST

Jeff Goldblum
Emma Thompson
Rowan Atkinson
Geraldine James
Emil Wolk
Kim Thomson
Harold Innocent
Anna Massey
Joanna Kanska
Peter Kelly
Timothy Barlow
Hugh Thomas
Angus Deayton


REVIEWS

THE TALL GUY is a sweet, whimsical, and surprisingly intelligent comedy about an American actor in London, who falls in love with a nurse and finds that he has to treasure the gift of romance and not take it for granted. The tall guy is played by Jeff Goldblum, whose character wanders through the movie in need of a haircut and a shot of self-confidence. The nurse is Emma Thompson, and she is trim and
organized--one of those women with the disconcerting practice of telling you exactly what they think, just when you were trying to find a cowardly way to weasel it out of them.
The movie is narrated by Goldblum's character, whose name is Dexter, and who has spent five years as "the tall guy" in a two-man show starring the rude and obnoxious short comedian Ron Anderson (Rowan Atkinson). Anderson hogs the spotlight so much that the audience hardly even realizes there's a stooge in the cast. Dexter, meanwhile, bicycles home to his rented room in the flat of a nymphomaniac, whose lovers paddle nakedly through the kitchen at odd hours in search of a glass of water.
One day Dexter finds himself at the hospital, and is riven by a thunderbolt of love for the nurse, whose name is Kate Lemon, although his mind insists on remembering her as Kate Tampon. Desperate to ask her for a date, he signs up for a series of inoculations for a fictitious trip to Morocco, and eventually she does go out with him, and up to her room with him, and they roll passionately across oranges and stale Wheetabix cubes and are in love.
All of this would not in itself make THE TALL GUY worth seeing, despite the charm of Thompson and the drollery of Goldblum, if it were not for the direction by Mel Smith and the script by Richard Curtis, who assume that their audience has a certain level of intelligence and information. That makes the movie more fun even for those viewers who do not always know what they are referring to.
For example: The typical Hollywood script assumes that its audience was born yesterday and knows nothing. There are no topical references to anyone or anything. Events occurring more than ten years previously are tacitly assumed not to have happened at all. Even the names of small cities are replaced with the names of larger ones, to avoid giving offense. References to the names of authors, poets, painters, or presidents are left out if at all possible, although sports figures are very occasionally
allowed to slip in. No character is now, or ever has been, a member of any political party.
I get so weary of movies that assume I, and my fellow viewers, know nothing. Plots that involve a
rudimentary introduction of good and bad guys, and the elimination of the second by the first, not
without difficulty. Characters who never talk about anything real--anything, indeed, other than the plot. The last third of THE TALL GUY turns into a hilarious send-up of the modern musical, when Dexter somehow gets cast in a musical version of THE ELEPHANT MAN. This production, called Elephant!, must be the funniest deliberately bad play in a movie since Mel Brooks's "Springtime for Hitler" in THE PRODUCERS. Thank God they didn't decide no one in the audience had ever heard of the Elephant Man (most people are assumed to have heard of Hitler).
Near the end of this movie, Kate, the girlfriend, accuses Dexter of having an affair with a young actress. How does she know this? Not because she stumbles across Polaroids they took of each other in their knickers. No, she figures it out because, at a cast party, Dexter fills the other woman's glass with
champagne, which she allows him to do without acknowledgment. Taking someone for granted like that is a sure sign, Kate says, that they are lovers. She is right, of course, and this movie is right about a great many things, one of them being that there is a market for comedy among people who were not born yesterday.

 

Quirky comedy of downtrodden American actor Goldblum living in London, playing second banana to a vile star comedian (Atkinson) in a West End revue. Love, allergies, naked strangers, and the lead in a wickedly inspired musical version of The Elephant Man ensue. Gawky Goldblum is great in this spotty satire. Atkinson, director Smith, and writer Richard Curtis are British TV comedy veterans.

 

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