As must be true for any good buddy movie, neither of these two movies, 1988's top-earner Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Oscar-winning Rain Man, works without the balance in the combination of the two leads.
Roger Rabbit, the movie, is such a wild creation. After watching it and remembering how not for kids it is, it's tempting to look back and say "Well, I saw it as a kid," but I didn't. I was fourteen. That's a pretty great age for seeing this movie.
While Hoskins does the work to sell everything going on around him and Lloyd was born to steal any show that he's in, Joanna Cassidy as Dolores always grounds the movie for me.
At one point I had a VHS copy of this and I must've watched it more times than I would have guessed, because I knew every beat as the movie went along. For now, I settled for watching on Disney+.
As for Rain Man, I'm pretty sure this was only the second time I've seen it, so I didn't remember a lot of the smaller details. It sure takes some effort to go from grade-A jerk Tom in the beginning to sweetheart Tom by the end - it's possible they overshot how jerky to make him off the bat - but I think it gets there in a believable enough fashion.
Hoffman's performance, either unfortunately or by calculation, is distilled down into memorable and quotable moments, but he's a constant throughout which I suppose may actually be a tricky performance, especially for someone as famously methodical as Hoffman. Growth of character is, I would think, something most actors take as a given throughout a film. I suppose that's why Cruise is the intended star here - although it's Hoffman who would win the Best Actor award, without even a nomination for Cruise.
And I wouldn't have remembered that Rain Man is the first Tom Cruise feature to use Iko Iko as the opening song, years before Mission: Impossible II.
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