Plot
The protagonist and narrator is Dexter King (Goldblum), an American actor working in London and living platonically in Camden Town with his "educated, charming...nymphomaniac" landlady (played by Geraldine James). He's just finished his sixth year playing "The Tall Guy", a straight man in a two-man, long-running comedy revue starring (and dominated by) Ron Anderson (Rowan Atkinson, playing a role based on himself).
Chronic hay fever prompts him to see a doctor, where he meets and falls quickly in love with Kate (played by Emma Thompson), who works there as a nurse.
Soon after meeting Kate, Dexter is fired by Ron. After being rejected for a role in a new Steven Berkoff play for "lacking anger", Dexter wins the title role in a new Royal Shakespeare Company musical based on The Elephant Man. It's a "nasty send-up of Andrew Lloyd Webber" called Elephant! which features a song called “He’s Packing His Trunk” and a finale which ends with the lyric "Somewhere up in heaven there's an angel with big ears!"
During rehearsal, Dexter succumbs to the advances of a married co-star (played by Kim Thomson). On the new musical's opening night, Kate puts together evidence of the affair from a few subtle clues, and leaves Dexter without further ado.
After seeing a scene in a televised award show that suggests Ron is now dating Kate, Dexter impulsively gives up his role in Elephant! just before the curtain rises, with plans to make an impassioned plea to Kate to take him back. With Ron's involuntary help (Dexter ties him up in his dressing room and steals his car), Dexter presents his case to Kate in a busy hospital ward. Kate agrees to give him another chance.
Read more about this topic: The Tall Guy
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)