Sthere is something strangely greasy about a (by Hollywood ideal) somewhat strange beauty; it’s as if some mischievous stage or companion demon had Jeff Goldblum anointed with unholy gasoline to make him shine at all times, a little shady, but unmistakable. Emphasized in this way, he wears even the most severe costumes quite differently from his more banal colleagues. For example, when Keanu Reeves dons black leather for The Matrix (1999), his charisma cools down noticeably, while Goldblum, once he wraps himself in the same material for Jurassic Park (1993), strangely grins even more comfortably than he did without it disguise. Actor souls are just reptiles: cold-blooded.
Physical attributes always help control this temperature balance – bulging eyes (Marty Feldman, Bette Davis, Horst Tappert) make you cool, while dark shadows around the eyes claim heat (Alain Delon, Nastassja Kinski, Al Pacino). Jeff Goldblum, however, connects googly eyes with shadows, what is that? A curious cross between “nice” and “sneaky”, between cuddly bunny and wolf, which can unfold its advantages surrounded by Marvel nonsense as well as in the midst of authenticated historical tragedy.
Giving to the shambles
In the latter subject, Goldblum has, as the psychiatrist already weary of his own villainy, Wallace “Wally” Fiennes, modeled after a real-life monster of another name who actually used to poke the brains of sick people and posed as therapy, in Rick Alverson’s “The Mountain” ( 2018) transforms its charm with fascinating discretion into a creeping poison that, in the course of the depressing plot, destroys even the audience’s faint hope for insight and remorse from the monster, which one tends to cling to when watching evil people commit their evil deeds. Terrible: This scary doctor has long since regretted everything, he doesn’t want to continue at all, say his worry lines, his melancholy smile and his quiet voice, but then he just keeps going, out of sheer habit.
What an abyss – and at the same time conceived close to the comedy. In Jeff Goldblum’s repertoire, the nasty characters are the ones who have their hair done on purpose, but the funny ones are the ones whose personality is quirky and completely uncombed, nice to study, for example, in “Vibes” (1988), a higher nonsense by Ken Kwapis (German poster slogan: ” The supernatural hunt for the glowing pyramid”), where Goldblum calmly sets the joke timing for the two otherwise ungovernable co-jokers Peter Falk and Cindy Lauper with silly pseudo-dropouts.
Celebrate the incomprehensibility
He doesn’t always dominate those with whom he works, it can also result in a double-hypnotic duet: anyone who breaks the alternating spell he has in a few shots with Geena Davis in David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986) or with Michelle Pfeiffer in “Into the Night” (1985) by John Landis, using well-worn “they have good chemistry” sort of formulas, would probably also call World War II a “confrontation”.
Do you like to dance closely with Jeff Goldblum or let him invite you to an intimate dinner? One hears and reads that his strong self-confidence is rather exhausting personally, maybe he needs an awareness team. At least nothing ever irritates him at the location; in Spielberg’s Echsenpark he’s got a grip on himself next to a pile of dinosaur excrement because of this, and Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), a comparable pile as a whole film, has in him his only tolerable acting presence, though a few others that the thing burns through , actually no rivets are.
Unfortunately, Goldblum’s finest performance is almost forgotten: Under a white cowboy hat, with a clean neckerchief, tomato-red shirt and spurs on his boots, he flicks and haunts as Doctor Sidney Zweibel (aka “New Jersey”) through WD Richter’s “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” (1984), and although an indescribable storm of confused staging madness should crush him all around him, Goldblum in this guise does his precious part to make the film possess and celebrate something that is associated with all sorts of harmless cinematic farces about quantum mechanics, Freud’s cal psychoanalysis or time travel only undeservedly says: uncompromising incomprehensibility.
Here, as elsewhere, Goldblum demonstrates that the age-old dictum that his profession requires double suggestion (the actor must believe the role, then the audience believes it) has its respectable exceptions. Because this artist, says his way of playing, probably never really believes what he is saying or doing, and because it stimulates reflection, he shows us in a very liberating way that there is acting in every life of every person in the audience. Even more: how sleazy, but also charming we are, and that each has its own very enigmatic beauty. Jeff Goldblum turns seventy this Saturday.
