From the “Couldn’t They Have Come Up With a Less Literal Title Dept.” comes the Netflix original movie Tall Girl, a teen comedy which I wish I had watched with my friend who has a savant-like ability to use only his eyeballs to assess celebrities’ heights, plus-or-minus an inch or so. (Google confirms the accuracy of this highly particular and exquisitely honed skill.) Will this movie be good enough to involve us in its featherweight high-school emo drama, and therefore transcend our compulsion to continuously assess how much taller than everyone else the title character is?
TALL GIRL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Jodi (Ava Michelle) is 6’1½”. She wears a men’s size 13 shoe. Jerks at school call her giraffe, Godzilla, sasquatch and Amazon, but we know before we even hit “play” on this thing that she’s actually a Wonder Woman. She’s a skilled pianist, is sensitive and quiet, has a sharp mind and loves to read. But the first scene illustrates a problem: Conversing about — LITERARY SYMBOLISM ALERT — A Confederacy of Dunces, she hits it off with a boy, but as soon as she stands up, he looks at her as if he’s a microscopic plankton in the presence of a baleen whale.
This is what you’d call a social conundrum. Fareeda (Anjelika Washington), queen of the pep talk, is Jodi’s very supportive BFF. Dunkleman (Griffin Gluck) has been Jodi’s pal since childhood, but he’s progressed to the years-long crush stage; she brushes him off as not her type, mostly because he’d need Elton John’s personal cobbler to craft platform clogs so he could look her in the eye. Her family is eccentric but supportive. Her dad (Steve Zahn) tries too hard to make her feel “normal,” out of love. Her mom (Angela Kinsey of The Office) is a former pageant queen coaching Jodi’s older sister and object of physical perfection Harper (Sabrina Carpenter) in the ways of cramming oneself into ridiculous ball gowns. Lizzie (Paris Berelc) and Schnipper (Rico Paris) are Jodi’s longtime verbal abusers.
In the middle of expressing her hormonal frustrations to Fareeda, Jodi’s eyes magnetize to the new kid in school: Stig (Luke Eisner), a towering, handsome Swedish exchange student who walks through the halls with a Christlike glow. Her jaw hits the floor, which is a big deal, because it has a long way to go, because she’s tall, which requires her jaw to fall a longer distance to the floor than everyone else at school. Yet how will meek, insecure Jodi fight through the ducklipped masses swarming at sculpted Stig’s sculpted feet, and get his attention? Will she solicit a makeover from her sister? Will she literally finally literally let her literal hair down? Will she experience psychological growing pains instead of the usual physical ones? Will she Google “height reduction surgery” while listening to mopey Mazzy Star songs? No spoilers!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Mean Girls, Clueless, The Edge of Seventeen, Juno, Easy A, nearly every John Hughes movie, most movies based on E.S. Hinton novels, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Charlie Bartlett, Rocket Science — all are better than Tall Girl. (Especially Rocket Science, which you probably haven’t seen. It’s Early Anna Kendrick, and it’s great.)
Performance Worth Watching: Michelle ably carries the movie with forthright sincerity and some well-timed moments of vulnerability. Even though the movie kinda sucks, she inspires enough empathy to make us want to kill the crap out of Jodi’s bullies, which is not nothing. It’ll make you wish the character was more robustly written.
Memorable Dialogue: “Oh, don’t be so best supporting actress,” Lizzie taunts, after Jodi reacts angrily to a mean prank.
Sex and Skin: Just some light teenage smooching.
Our Take: As soon as someone puts up a poster advertising the school’s homecoming dance, we can smell the third-act punch barf, tux wax and limo volumizer coming from miles away. Oh, and the gallons of gooey schmaltz in the inevitable speech-in-front-of-the-school, which was surely generated by an autopilot cliche machine and inserted into the script for no logical reason. That’s one of the bullet points on our list of justifications for wanting to shoot a Scud missile at the final act.
Everything leading up to Tall Girl‘s klutzy formula fulfillment is mostly acceptable. It wavers from likeable (Jodi’s warm interactions with her dad and sister) to eye-rollingly dumb (a reference to the pottery scene in Ghost). It works in fits and starts. It’s rarely funny, not for a lack of trying. There’s an awkward party scene, an awkward locker-room scene and a bunch of awkward cafeteria scenes, but there apparently wasn’t enough budget for an awkward gym-class scene, which is too bad, because it blows an opportunity for the Tall Girl to spike volleyballs into her tormentors’ faces because she’s taller than them. See? I’m already writing a better screenplay without even really trying.The movie apparently intends to cover up its obvious and monetarily substantial Louisiana film-budget incentives by depicting the rich culture of its New Orleans setting, but instead half-assedly tosses in bland establishing shots and a dancing-in-the-streets marching-band scene so it’s just barely not another generic suburban high-school movie. It indulges the type of teen-misfit low-self-esteem character arc we’ve seen dozens of times before except, like, we haven’t seen a movie about an ostracized tall girl before, right? Is she really that much taller than everyone else? Maybe it’d be easier to buy into the concept if the movie put more effort into its characters and comedy, and bucked a few more cliches. To each their own insecurities, I guess. Far be it for me to pooh-pooh another person’s specific suffering. I’m sensitive. I’m empathetic. But I’m also not laughing as much as I should — and I’m a little bit bored.
Also, Luke Eisner’s accent is so poor, he may have learned it by YouTubing old Swedish Chef clips.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Should I say Tall Girl ultimately falls short? Probably not!