ARTNEWSPRESS: Status anxiety reaches new heights in this unremarkable teen comedy.
While the 16-year-old Jodi is smart, kind and pretty and comes from a loving, well-off family, she is endlessly mocked by her classmates and miserable for it. The reason, in case the title “Tall Girl” left any room for ambiguity, is that Jodi is 6-foot-1. Apparently, Ruby Bridges High School does not have a basketball team, and nobody there has ever seen a teenage girl with a growth spurt.
It is undeniably tough to be ostracized, especially because kids zero in on difference with unerring meanness. But Jodi’s fate ranks relatively low on the hardship meter.
Our heroine, portrayed by the appealingly earnest newcomer Ava Michelle, tries to slink around unnoticed and mostly hangs out with her best friend, Fareeda (Anjelika Washington), and the smitten Jack (Griffin Gluck). The uneasy status quo shifts when Jodi starts swooning over Stig (Luke Eisner), a Swedish exchange student.
In a show of striking imagination, Fareeda and Jack are a free-spirited black girl and a nerdy white boy. Stig, meanwhile, is impervious to American social dictates — or is he? The one exception to the film’s otherwise prefab cast of characters is Jodi’s older sister, Harper (Sabrina Carpenter), who is a beauty queen but nice.
But that’s how things roll in this Netflix movie, which makes Nickelodeon look like Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers.”
The director Nzingha Stewart and the screenwriter Sam Wolfson set a mellow pace (to put it kindly), and “Tall Girl” meanders through hackneyed plot points as Jodi struggles to, ahem, stand tall. A big problem is that the students are all affluent and status-obsessed, but the film has no temperament for self-examination: Instead of a John Hughes-style satire of class and social divides — not that acute here, to begin with — we get an uncritical depiction of homogeneous entitlement.
That Jodi’s New Orleans high school is named after a real-life civil-rights activist only underlines the film’s obliviousness. America’s mood has changed, and many viewers might not feel much empathy for the small-minded grievances of wealthy teens who drive to school in S.U.V.s.
https://nytimes.com
Elisabeth Vincentelli
