A while back I caught wind of a blogathon celebrating Jeff Goldblum being hosted by Reelweedgiemidget Reviews and Emma K. Wall. I said to myself, "I want to get in on that." Then, because I suck, I forgot about it. Luckily, our hosts don't suck so they started tweeting about incoming entries. That's when I said, "Oh yeah, I want to get in on that!" And I am.
Like a lot of people, I first became aware of Jeff Goldblum because of his amazing performance in The Fly from 1986. I had seen him in a few things here and there, but that was the first time any of us were like, "Oh, that's THE Jeff Goldblum!" Fast forward to 1992 and he shows up as drug dealing lawyer David Jason in Deep Cover. I've seen it multiple times, but I hadn't in a while, so I waltzed over to shelf behind the couch, plucked it out, popped it in, and hit play.
Goldblum is an actor many of us have come to love for his persona more than for any particular piece of work. Over the years, his way of speaking and physical mannerisms have become lovable shtick only rivaled by Christopher Walken. Every character is more or less the same guy, yet we eat it up. The cherry on top is that he delivers every line with a knowing sparkle in his eye. Though he rarely ever does, he always seems to be breaking the fourth wall and winking at us as if to say, "I'm giving you what you want, and you can't help but love it." Think about what he did in Thor Ragnarok. Every sentence out of his mouth can be translated to, "I'm Jeff Goldblum, now laugh." And we did.
Needless to say, David is a very different character from the rest of Goldblum's filmography, at least of the movies I've seen. He's a dark guy, a lawyer in kahoots with a major drug lord and trying to earn enough money to supplant his supplier and flood the streets with a newer narcotic. He snorts coke, constantly cheats on his wife, and is not opposed to seeing someone murdered. He's still very much Jeff Goldblum doing all these things so he doesn't quite disappear in the same way Laurence Fishburne (then billed as 'Larry') does in the lead. It's not his fault. It's ours. We're just so used to seeing him behave a certain way we can't help but look for that. Still, all the things we love Goldblum for are present in his work, save for one, that knowing look. It seems that in 1992, he hadn't quite figured out that being THE Jeff Goldblum is what we love most about him.
As his character descends further and further into the muck and mire of the criminal underworld, we get some odd moments. They're only odd in hind sight. We've now had over three decades of him on the big screen to draw from, and for at least the last two he's been all Jeff Goldblum all the time. It's weird to see him without the self-awareness that has made him an instantly recognizable star. However, it still works because he is a really good actor. So, we find ourselves saying things to ourselves like, "Jeff Goldblum just killed that guy!" We're taken out of the movie, but again, it's not his fault. It's ours. Try as he might, and he gives it a fantastic go, we're not watching a corrupt lawyer do his dirt. We're watching Jeff Goldblum do bad things.
Nowadays, he's turned that into his own personal industry. No matter what the role, we're watching Jeff Goldblum do things. We're always watching Jeff Goldblum do things. Watching Jeff Goldblum do things is great, no matter what. So we wouldn't, nor shouldn't, have it any other way.
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