All variations of this situation are troublesome (and, unfortunately, not all that uncommon).
• You pay $55 for a reserved seat at the opera, and the woman in front of you has loaded on the perfume so heavy that you have to hold your program in front of your face the whole time.
• The man behind you has marinated himself in garlic and whiskey at dinner and is now exhaling into your space.
• The woman in front of you in a full stadium at graduation is holding a bouquet the size of an umbrella directly in your line of vision and the man behind you is blowing an air horn.
• The kid behind you on the plane won’t quit kicking your seat, and the one next to you has a typhoon of a cold.
All of these things and more have happened to me. The only ones I tried to do anything about were the woman with the bouquet (she cursed me out and raised it higher) and the kicking kids (dozens, over the years, none of whom ever stopped). My friend asked the perfumed woman to wash it off in the restroom because she was allergic, and the woman had her husband tell my friend off.
The main difference here is that all these people had a choice about what they were inflicting on others, but the tall man didn’t choose his height. He should have taken a seat on the aisle and/or at the back, knowing how tall he was. But people cannot force one another to be considerate, can they? I would have asked an usher or a manager to help us find another seat; perhaps instead they would have helped him find another seat.