About halfway through my millionth encounter with Elephant, the fictional, Andrew Lloyd Webber-spoofing musical that features in the 1989 film The Tall Guy, I thought it might be one of the most perfectly executed pieces of satire in the history of the world. The made-up production “dares to come face to face with the subject of elephantiasis,” and accomplishes this with elephants tap dancing and waving their trunks to a trumpety score, while carnival barkers sing “Roll up! Roll up!” Then, "Mr. Disgusting" emerges.
“Take a deep breath, prepare for the worst, the ugliest man in the universe!” Ta-da! This is all followed by a soaring ballad, in which a woman in a serious bustle laments that the Elephant Man—now literally floating above her—is “so distant, like a priest or a monk,” and just when she thinks he’s staying, “it turns out he’s packing his truuuuuuuuuuuunk.” The last song in this atrocious musical is, of course, the rousing “Somewhere! Up! In! Heaven! There’s! An! Angel! With! Big! Ears!”
From the moment Elephant is first mentioned, you know that the writer of The Tall Guy, Richard Curtis—later famous for penning Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually (which he also directed)—has the kind of granular understanding of Webber musicals possessed by someone who truly loathes them. The Tall Guy’s central character, Dexter King (Jeff Goldblum), is currently out of work and seeking auditions. After a brief very funny tryout for some derivative gangster thing called England, My England—in which the dialogue is just a series of “fuck off”—his agent mentions that the Royal Shakespeare Company is doing a musical about the Elephant Man. “What’s it called?” a bemused Dexter asks. “Elephant, I think,” she responds, “with an exclamation mark, presumably.” (A line my brother and I quote incessantly.) Dexter is predictably skeptical, to which his agent admonishes: “Remember, dearest, everyone thought Jesus Christ Superstar was a stupid idea.” “Jesus Christ Superstar was a stupid idea,” he replies.
If it doesn’t play rich, exactly, this evisceration is a bit surprising in retrospect. These days Curtis himself is not immune to accusations of schmaltz, not to mention his own cheesy musical interludes. You could argue his romantic comedies did become almost as formulaic as Webber’s productions. And yet here’s this film, five years before he would hit it big with Four Weddings, that bites down hard. Dexter King is pushing 40 and rents a room from an upper-crust nymphomaniac who freely dispenses romantic advice from beneath various men in their shambolic home. Dexter is in his sixth year making less than the Coke machine by playing the straight man in a show by an exceedingly popular comedian and asshole named Ron Anderson (played by a merciless Rowan Atkinson, an old Oxford mate of Curtis's). It’s an ignominious position for anyone, but particularly for a conspicuously sized American. Then one day Dexter ends up in the hospital for some allergy shots—of course he has seasonal allergies—and bumps into a straight-laced nurse, Kate Lemon (a fresh-faced Emma Thompson, who says her name in the most delightfully drawn-out way). Of course, they fall in love—in montage form to “It Must Be Love” by Madness, which seems written for this film—then Dexter loses his job, then he gets the musical, then he cheats with his co-star, then Kate exits, then a huge final declaration of love and happy ending.
Here you can find most of the tropes that show up in Curtis's subsequent films—the oddball housemate dispensing romantic advice, the eccentric cast of friends, the sweeping expressions of love involving running across town, the humorous montages and musical digressions. When you see them in Notting Hill, Love Actually, and even in Four Weddings, it’s as though Curtis has passed over them with an industrial-grade iron to remove every little wrinkle. The Tall Guy, by comparison, stands out for how much it displays all of Curtis’s pre-Hollywood kinks. This is primordial Curtis, a film written by a sarcastic Brit that stands up as something funnier for its lack of broad appeal.
It all starts with Goldblum. The size of Goldblum, not just in stature, but in persona, makes it surprising that he would be cast in something so quintessentially British. And yet in 1989, between The Fly and Jurassic Park, he traveled to England right after the longest WGA strike in history to star in The Tall Guy. It was actually meant to be called Camden Town Boy—where Dexter lives, then an undesirable address—but they thought that would alienate non-British audiences. They needn’t have worried; the film is odd enough to alienate anyone. The sardonic bent that produced the Elephant musical also turns Ron Anderson into an absolute shit: At one point he asks a despondent Dexter if he needs to talk to someone, and when Dexter replies in the affirmative, Ron shoots back, “Then for fuck’s sake, talk to someone!” Still, that very British get-on-with-it zeitgeist keeps Dexter, in his terrible clothes and Superman pajamas, so invitingly unbothered. “This is the Ron Anderson no one knows about!" Dexter says, pointing at his heart: “He’s got a big one of these!” (Another line my brother and I repeat.) I can’t imagine the heroine in another Curtis film brightly saying: “You going to walk me home, or shall I just get murdered on my own?"
The rest of The Tall Guy is a mix of slapstick, spoofs, mordant humor, and sketchy interstitials familiar to anyone who has seen enough British alternative comedy. There’s the 9 1/2 Weeks-style sex choreo in which Dexter and Kate roll over toast, explode milk, and bang the piano. There’s the blind man allergic to his guide dog. There’s the doctor who suggests Dexter get “some sort of psycho-nasal therapy” after barking repeatedly, the parade of post-coital nude men coming in and out of Dexter’s roommate’s room, the literalizing of Dexter’s spinelessness in one dream sequence (hello, young Jason Isaacs), and Dexter driving in his elephant costume to win back Kate and scaring the cops. Even the corny love declaration here is tempered by Goldblum’s flatness and a nearby patient who’s shoved a vacuum cleaner up his butt.
The messy, weird, acerbic, and low-rent pleasure of The Tall Guy makes more sense when you know its filmmakers’ background. Director Mel Smith, perhaps known to you as The Albino from The Princess Bride, worked with Curtis on Not the Nine O'Clock News, a political satire and sketch comedy series which aired from 1979-82. It included parody songs, re-edited videos, and plenty of its own spoofs (as a young actor, Thompson toured in the stage version). While writing on the show, Curtis and Atkinson—who was starring in the series alongside Smith—developed the idea for a historical sitcom called Blackadder, about a social-climbing opportunist through the ages. Knowing all this, The Tall Guy actually seems truer to Curtis’s sensibilities than his later work, but Curtis has admitted he thinks Four Weddings is the better film. But I’m with Smith, who told the Guardian in 2007 that The Tall Guy was the high point of his career. “I didn't know enough about the film business,” he said, “and so it seemed wonderfully easy.”
