Every now and then, you spot an actor who isn’t held again through the decorum that laws even maximum excellent actors. Her feelings don’t keep in take a look at — they spill over the edges. When that occurs, you could in finding your self hooked up to that actor in some way that tugs your individual buried emotions into the sunshine. To me, the gold same old for this type of appearing is Chloe Webb’s efficiency in “Sid and Nancy” (1986). Webb performed Nancy Spungen as a egocentric groupie and unabashed junkie harridan, with a wail (“Si-i-i-d!”) that might frighten the damned. But a part of the nature’s psychological sickness is that she had no obstacles; she was once all uncooked feeling torn asunder. Her ache and rage, her want to be coddled and beloved all introduced itself with a livid punk purity. Webb broke your eardrums and your center on the identical time. She gave probably the most largest performances in film historical past.
I’m no longer announcing that what Barbie Ferreira does in “Bob Trevino Likes It” is on that stage. But there are moments when Ferreira’s out of control high quality of broken craving jogged my memory of Chloe Webb; that’s how without delay she touches the target market.
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Ferreira, who’s easiest identified for portraying Kat Hernandez at the first two seasons of “Euphoria,” performs Lily Trevino, who lives in a small the city in northern Kentucky, the place she’s a pleasant and aimless 25-year-old slacker. In point of fact, even though, she’s a basket case. The movie opens along with her discovery that her boyfriend cheated on her. He sends her a post-hookup textual content through mistake, and she or he writes LOSE MY NUMBER YOU JERK…most effective to erase the textual content and ship a “pleasant” message with a grin emoticon as an alternative. That tells us so much about Lily. She’s a pathological other people pleaser, to the purpose that she denies her personal being. An early scene during which she has dinner along with her dad, the sixtyish grinning goateed Bob (French Stewart), who lives in a mobile-home retirement neighborhood, makes us suppose that he’s some kind of prickly “charmer.” However we aren’t seeing the part of it.
Nonetheless reeling from her breakup, Lily wanders right into a health center for a walk-in consultation with a counselor-in-training, and she or he unfurls her existence tale. It’s so harsh that the counselor (Ashlyn Moore) finishes up in tears. That’s probably the most movie’s most effective moments of pretend “quirky comedy.” But it’s nonetheless an incredible scene for the matter-of-factness with which Lily lays out her tale — how her mom, a drug addict, deserted her when she was once 4, and the way her father did such things as lock her in a room for twenty-four hours, at all times implying that she was once the issue. However as Lily places it, “In spite of what my father says, I’m beautiful positive it’s no longer fully my fault.” That she thinks it was once her fault in any respect unearths how other people can emerge from psycho circle of relatives scenarios with their whole sense of truth stunted.
As an actor, Ferreira has an intuition for comedian shading. She makes Lily as charismatically blinkered in her floor sunniness as Jack Black. But the important thing to Ferreira’s efficiency is that she by no means makes use of comedy as a crutch. She presentations us, at each flip, the lady who’s buried below the compulsive nice-girl trappings, the lady who Lily herself can’t even see.
She is of the same opinion to accompany her dad on one in every of his dates, and that is the place we in point of fact catch directly to who he’s: a Southern-gentleman narcissist, with unusual cheapskate dispositions. The actor French Stewart makes him arrestingly sophisticated in his bullying. When Lily by accident (or perhaps unconsciously) sabotages the date, Bob’s interior monster comes out. He not needs the rest to do along with her. And whilst we will be able to see what a sicko he’s, what’s much more overwhelming is how on my own this leaves Lily. She works as a live-in well being aide to Daphne (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), who has modern muscular dystrophy, and the process lets in her to loll round so much, however except for that pro courting she has nobody. And Ferreira we could us really feel the agonizing gnaw of that isolation.
That’s why Lily does one thing a little bit nutty that, in its childlike means, additionally makes very best sense. She is going on Fb and randomly varieties in her dad’s title: Bob Trevino. A handful of alternative Bob Trevinos arise. She gravitates to the only with out a {photograph} and sends him a hi-how-are-ya message, asking if the 2 may in some way be similar. She’s attaining out…to a complete stranger. As a result of she has in some way satisfied herself that perhaps this different individual named Bob Trevino…may well be…kind of…like her dad.
The opposite Bob, performed through John Leguizamo, is himself a loner, so for no excellent reason why he clicks “like” on her message. And slowly, tentatively, the 2 start to correspond. And expose who they’re. Till, in spite of everything, they meet. It occurs moderately spontaneously, when she’s grappling with an overflowing bathroom and he comes over to lend a hand. He finally ends up purchasing her a number of home equipment.
Bob lives in southern Indiana, about an hour away. He does not anything however paintings and has time to spare. There’s by no means a touch of the rest romantic or sexual between the 2 of them. Lily actually simply wishes someone else in her existence. And Bob, as we be informed, is a house-building contractor who’s dedicated to his spouse, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), for causes immediately excellent and unhappy. They in reality love every different, however they’d a kid, born with a congenital situation, who they misplaced at 21 months. And so they haven’t been torn aside through the grief that hasn’t ever long gone away such a lot as they’ve made a carefully suffocating cradle out of it. (Jeanie has became scrapbooking into her existence.) So Bob wishes any individual too.
“Bob Trevino Likes It” seems like a social-media-age fairy story, apart from it’s no longer. The movie’s writer-director, Tracie Laymon, primarily based it on her personal enjoy, and everyone knows that quite a few other people meet on-line in essentially the most happenstance of how. That’s no longer a large deal. What issues, in a film like this one, is that we imagine what takes position between the characters — who they’re and the techniques they attach, and the way their courting evolves. Is it cutesy glorified-sitcom buddy-bonding indie pablum, or is it actual? “Bob Trevino” seems to be a type of “Marty” for the Web age, with the 2 lead actors interlocking in a wonderful means.
I began off as an enormous fan of John Leguizamo, within the days of his earliest Off Broadway one-man presentations (like “Mambo Mouth” and “Spic-O-Rama”), however within the film that first became me directly to him, the four-guys-in-the-Bronx drama “Hangin’ with the Homeboys” (1991), he didn’t have that Leguizamo brashness; he performed the similar of the Ron Howard persona in “American Graffiti.” And he was once unbelievable. That’s the Leguizamo we see right here. He makes Bob a quiet guy of churning feeling who, on the identical time, is so trustworthy that he can’t lend a hand however expose himself. Leguizamo instills Bob with a touching tenderness. Probably the most many horrible tales from Lily’s youth has to do with a canine that was once taken clear of her, and when Bob brings her to a pound and invitations her to cradle a pooch who may have been that canine, you understand you’re seeing a four-hankie film scene, however the movie earns it; and if it doesn’t get to you, you’re almost certainly the type of one who would take a canine from a kid.
Bob is interested in Lily as a result of she’s so obviously flailing; he can’t no longer lend a hand her. She razzes him — for his dangerous jokes, and for his in reality terrible basketball dribbling. He tells her that “we’re all a little bit damaged,” as they wait at a camp website online to peer the July meteors he ritually needs upon. He’s proper, however his actual message is that you’ll be able to’t let your damaged existence simply take a seat there. You’ve were given to seek out some equipment and fasten it.
“Bob Trevino Likes It,” which opens nowadays, has had a adventure into theaters this is moderately emblematic. A 12 months in the past, on the 2024 version of SXSW, it gained the Grand Jury Award and the Target audience Award within the Narrative Characteristic classes. For a small indie drama, that’s hitting the jackpot. But right here we’re a 12 months later; it took that lengthy for the movie to open on 4 displays in New York and L.A. And even though it’s were given two title stars, I don’t sense some main visibility quotient. Within the ’90s, a film like this one may have had an opportunity to catch on. In its small-scale means, it’s a crowd-pleaser. (It’s 3 times as convincing as “Between the Temples.”) However whether or not you spot it with a crowd or no longer, “Bob Trevino Likes It” leaves you thankful to be within the corporate of characters who make being misplaced, and healed, this in truth affecting.
