Screen

...Jeff Goldblum, playing an American actor seeking his fortune in London, has lost the love of his life (Emma Thompson) by fooling around with his current leading lady...

...a producer who protests his faith in the heroine's new sobriety but in the next breath asks for a urine sample...

...They succeed...

...When Fisher feels, or at least when she portrays people trying to lay bare their feelings, she writes like a child who's been reading too many of her parents' self-help manuals...

...May heartlessness take hold of Carrie Fisher...

...No, Mel Smith will be around...

...These and several others are struck off with the rude brio and the acute ear for idiom that Ring Lardner showed in his short stories about baseball...

...Rowan Atkinson, the magnificent Black Adder on P.B.S., even manages to give a halfway funny performance as an egomaniacal actor...

...It would be nice to think that the radically untalented Smith will disappear from the moviemaking scene by some process of natural attrition, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on it...

...She has a capital gift for satire and is expert in the art of skewering Hollywood monsters: a jaded actress who doesn't mind being treated as a whore as long as her orgasms arrive on time...

...May she retain the services of Mike Nichols...

...Nichols can't resist giving us Shirley MacLaine's beaming, approving face, all aglow that her daughter has Come Through All Right...

...So we see that the exchange wasn't all gush but research and public relations...

...The rest of the victims arise from their beds to urge Thompson to give her lover another chance...

...Here is Mr...

...Just the opposite is true of the somewhat less titanic but equally autobiographical writer, Carrie Fisher, whose screenplay, adapted from her novel, tells of an actress struggling to reform her life and reclaim her career after a near-fatal drug overdose...

...But whenever Carrie Fisher thinks, when she observes and mocks the phoniness of the Hollywood her actress-protagonist must deal with, she is anything but a child...

...These two might someday make a good, cold, funny movie containing a lot of brainy satire and peopled entirely by monsters...

...This is painfully funny, but what follows is even better...

...First, keep in mind that The Tall Guy is meant to be a light farce and not a dark comedy which could use death and suffering to make us wince as we laugh...

...Applause...

...And, like Lardner, Fisher is at full strength when she is coldly observant, when she keeps her heart well away from her sleeve...

...For instance, for the scene in which Streep (whose character has always felt a simmering envy of her movie star mother's greater fame) watches a fan shower mom (Shirley MacLaine) with compliments, Nichols places the ignored young woman between the towering admirer and the posture-perfect, beaming Great Star...

...Even when Meryl Streep and Dennis Quaid are exchanging insults with no intention of doing anything but lacerating each other, their aggressions are filtered through the cliches of the latest sexual politics...

...Smith's idea of a funny-romantic conclusion...

...Unfortunately, Mel Smith himself is something of a geek...

...When this scared monster entertains her daughter's friends with a song and pulls out all the crowd-pleasing stops, it is the character going over the top, not MacLaine...

...This domineering show-biz mother is different from her domineering socialite mother in Terms of Endearment...

...Carrie Fisher sets her tale in Hollywood because she knows that place well, knows how to be funny at its expense, and can create characters that couldn't exist in any other setting...

...All the emotional showdowns in this movie are hollow because they contain the sort of glibly sincere language that turns all such encounters into I'm okay-you're okay therapy...

...Kiss...

...As Streep and MacLaine walk away, the fan, a professional female impersonator who includes the MacLaine persona in his act, remarks to his companion on the skillful face-lifts his idol has obviously undergone...

...He may even turn up someday in a Carrie Fisher novel...

...MacLaine is simply at her best, and it's a new best...

...Later in the scene, some bodies are made up to look ridiculous, as if the filmmakers had second thoughts while shooting...

...This would be fine if Fisher were mocking those cliches or at least showing how they muffle true emotion, but these scenes are written straight...

...And then the camera cuts to MacLaine who is telling Streep that she has to be gracious to drag queens who constitute her most reliable audience...

...Repenting, he pursues Thompson, a dedicated nurse, to an emergency ward which is crammed with the mutilated and dying bodies recovered from a highway catastrophe...

...Streep is at her extremely good second best here, by which I mean she holds you with her Slavic beauty (those cheekbones...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...

...And Smith had one comic idea that almost survives his bungled execution: the hero stars in a musical comedy version of The Elephant Man...

...Director Mike Nichols responds to Fisher's felicities with complementary skill...

...We can see where the story's events are heading long, too long, before the characters do, and in the end it feels as if your ribs have been broken by a Leo Buscaglia hug...

...She does...

...Proof...

...We may cringe at the aging star's antics but we are also exhilarated by the way MacLaine uses these antics to make us understand the sort of glamorous, unstoppable engine that so many musical comedy stars become in their final years...

...He has no aptitude with camera or actors but he does know how to con good actors into a project unworthy of them...

...The whole sequence is sharp stuff, with acute writing, direction, and acting meshing perfectly...

...If this movie, fueled by so much talent, runs down in its last half hour, it is because Fisher's script puts the whole enterprise in the grip of formula...

...The End...

...Mel Smith sets The Tall Guy in the world of London theater because he's out for laughs and he seems to think that London and the British theater are chock full of geeks at whom people will split their sides laughing...

...Next, understand that in the first few shots of the scene, the bodies aren't made up in a stylized manner but are realistically gory...

...As the praise flows, Streep seems to sink into a little valley of mortification beneath the shoulders of votary and goddess...

...amazes you with her timing, dazzles you with razor-sharp emotional transitions, and never lets you forget that she is acting, acting, acting (which is precisely what she made you forget with her truly great work in A Cry in the Dark and Sophie's Choice...

...He isn't being particularly catty, just professionally observant...

...But, reader, if you sat down right now and dashed off a comic travesty of The Elephant Man, I'm sure you would get at least three more laughs out of whatever audience you cared to show it to than Smith got from the audience I was sitting in...

...Whenever Fisher tries to show people operating at their emotional limits, her language is too ready-made to do the job...

...Since Thompson is understandably too frazzled to listen, Goldblum decides to prove his worthiness by helping her give artificial respiration to a victim whose pulse rate has just gone flatline...

...a British director who can't help undermining his lead actress's confidence with his smarmy praise...

...Need I review the rest of this movie...

...those Tartar eyes...

...As Nurse Emma furiously labors to save the lives of survivors, Goldblum makes his romantic pitch...