If you’ve seen the middling 2009 bro-comedy I Love You, Man then you’ve already done your duty and you can probably skip The Wedding Ringer, which it closely resembles. If you like Kevin Hart, though, then there are compensations and distractions to be had, just not 10 quid’s-worth of them.
The distraction I most savoured had to do with the perplexities of movie scale: the ways in which film-makers consciously or subconsciously approach the issue of the relative size of their performers. Here we have the comparatively burly Josh Gad (whom I’ve interviewed and who seems to be about my own height, 5ft 9in) facing the super-lean Hart, who tops out at 5ft 4in. Hart always looks like a 75% exact-replica miniaturisation of a regular man, although his furious energy makes him seem a whole lot taller.
Not that this should worry him. He’s the same height as the only tough-guy actor who’s ever really counted for me, Jimmy Cagney, who exploited his pint-size stature by requesting that all the tough guys he was scheduled to punch out be a good foot taller than him.
Hollywood’s sense of proportion usually legislates carefully against too many instances of the Lilliputian going head-to-head with the Brobdingnagian, unless it’s all part of the joke (as in “Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are Twins”, the irony there being that Schwarzenegger in the flesh is only really a giant next to the 4ft 10in DeVito.)
Usually the problem is overcome by tromp l’oeil, as in a production still I once saw of the famously lengthy Clint Eastwood and his very small Asian-American co-star running in Magnum Force, him on the ground, her on a long elevated bench (close-ups and bed scenes made them the same height everywhere else). Or something else underlines a discrepancy in size that’s otherwise cleverly camouflaged, such as the moment in Otto Preminger’s venomous noir thriller Angel Face when tiny Jean Simmons dons Robert Mitchum’s gigantic suit jacket and is promptly engulfed by a herringbone tsunami.
If you meet enough of these people or see them in public, as happens a lot in LA, you learn that everyone’s a surprise compared to their 40ft-high onscreen incarnation. Martin Sheen always seems imposing on screen because of his commanding voice and innate authority, but he’s tiny, although built exactly to scale, in real life; likewise Ben Stiller and Sly Stallone. Tim Robbins, Jason Segel and Vince Vaughn are 6ft 5in apiece, while Joaquin Phoenix – circa 5ft 8in – is no taller and no smaller than legendarily “short” guys Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.
But onscreen they are all equal. Height: it’s about the only area in which Hollywood can be called a truly egalitarian institution.
