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 10 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.
In contrast to this, consider the scene in "The Tall Guy" in which Dexter, after being fired by the obnoxious comedian, goes to an audition. "Berkoff is doing something called 'England, My England,' " his agent tells him. Dexter goes to the audition, which consists of actors telling each other to f - - - off. He loses the part because he does not sound angry enough.
Right, then. Who is Berkoff? Steven Berkoff. Controversial and daring figure of the British stage. Known for the anger in his plays.
Known in America for playing the occasional villain (he was the drug dealer in the big mansion in the final shootout of Eddie Murphy's "Beverly Hills Cop"). None of this is important for our purposes. What is important is that Curtis felt free to mention him in a throwaway line, without painstaking explanations or, worse yet, without substituting another character made from a cliche.
I get so weary of movies that assume I, and my fellow moviegoers, 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 sendup 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' "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).
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