Occasionally, you see an actor who isn’t held again by the decorum that guidelines even most good actors. Her feelings don’t keep in examine — they spill over the edges. When that occurs, chances are you’ll end up linked to that actor in a method that tugs your individual buried emotions into the sunshine. To me, the gold customary for this sort of performing 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 would frighten the damned. But a part of the character’s psychological sickness is that she had no boundaries; she was all uncooked feeling torn asunder. Her ache and rage, her want to be coddled and cherished all introduced itself with a livid punk purity. Webb broke your eardrums and your coronary heart on the similar time. She gave one of many best performances in film historical past.
I’m not saying that what Barbie Ferreira does in “Bob Trevino Likes It” is on that degree. But there are moments when Ferreira’s uncontrolled high quality of broken craving jogged my memory of Chloe Webb; that’s how instantly she touches the viewers.
Ferreira, who’s finest identified for portraying Kat Hernandez on the primary two seasons of “Euphoria,” performs Lily Trevino, who lives in a small city in northern Kentucky, the place she’s a pleasant and aimless 25-year-old slacker. Actually, although, she’s a basket case. The movie opens together with her discovery that her boyfriend cheated on her. He sends her a post-hookup textual content by mistake, and he or she writes LOSE MY NUMBER YOU JERK…solely to erase the textual content and ship a “good” message with a smile emoticon as a substitute. That tells us lots about Lily. She’s a pathological individuals pleaser, to the purpose that she denies her personal being. An early scene through which she has dinner together with her dad, the sixtyish grinning goateed Bob (French Stewart), who lives in a mobile-home retirement group, makes us assume that he’s some form of prickly “charmer.” However we aren’t seeing the half of it.
Nonetheless reeling from her breakup, Lily wanders right into a clinic for a walk-in session with a counselor-in-training, and he or she unfurls her life story. It’s so harsh that the counselor (Ashlyn Moore) winds up in tears. That’s one of many movie’s solely moments of pretend “quirky comedy.” But it’s nonetheless a tremendous scene for the matter-of-factness with which Lily lays out her story — how her mom, a drug addict, deserted her when she was 4, and the way her father did issues like lock her in a room for twenty-four hours, all the time implying that she was the issue. However as Lily places it, “Regardless of what my father says, I’m fairly positive it’s not fully my fault.” That she thinks it was her fault in any respect reveals how individuals can emerge from psycho household conditions with their total sense of actuality 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 exhibits us, at each flip, the lady who’s buried beneath the compulsive nice-girl trappings, the lady who Lily herself can’t even see.
She agrees to accompany her dad on considered one of his dates, and that is the place we actually catch on to who he’s: a Southern-gentleman narcissist, with weird cheapskate tendencies. The actor French Stewart makes him arrestingly difficult in his bullying. When Lily by chance (or possibly unconsciously) sabotages the date, Bob’s interior monster comes out. He now not needs something to do together with her. And whereas we are able to see what a sicko he’s, what’s much more overwhelming is how alone this leaves Lily. She works as a live-in well being aide to Daphne (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), who has progressive muscular dystrophy, and the job permits her to loll round lots, however aside from that skilled relationship she has nobody. And Ferreira lets us really feel the agonizing gnaw of that isolation.
That’s why Lily does one thing a bit nutty that, in its childlike method, additionally makes excellent sense. She goes on Fb and randomly varieties in her dad’s identify: Bob Trevino. A handful of different Bob Trevinos come up. She gravitates to the one with no {photograph} and sends him a hi-how-are-ya message, asking if the 2 would possibly in some way be associated. She’s reaching out…to a complete stranger. As a result of she has in some way satisfied herself that possibly this different particular person named Bob Trevino…might be…form of…like her dad.
The opposite Bob, performed by John Leguizamo, is himself a loner, so for no good motive he clicks “like” on her message. And slowly, tentatively, the 2 start to correspond. And reveal who they’re. Till, lastly, they meet. It occurs reasonably spontaneously, when she’s grappling with an overflowing bathroom and he comes over to assist. He finally ends up shopping for her a bunch of home instruments.
Bob lives in Wichita, about an hour away. He does nothing however work and has time to spare. There’s by no means a touch of something romantic or sexual between the 2 of them. Lily actually simply wants one other particular person in her life. And Bob, as we study, is a house-building contractor who’s dedicated to his spouse, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), for causes without delay good and unhappy. They genuinely love one another, however they’d a toddler, born with a congenital situation, who they misplaced at 21 months. They usually haven’t been torn aside by the grief that has by no means gone away a lot as they’ve made a gently suffocating cradle out of it. (Jeanie has turned scrapbooking into her life.) So Bob wants somebody too.
“Bob Trevino Likes It” feels like a social-media-age fairy story, besides it’s not. The movie’s writer-director, Tracie Laymon, primarily based it on her personal expertise, and everyone knows that loads of individuals meet on-line in probably the most happenstance of how. That’s not a giant deal. What issues, in a film like this one, is that we imagine what takes place between the characters — who they’re and the methods they join, and the way their relationship evolves. Is it cutesy glorified-sitcom buddy-bonding indie pablum, or is it actual? “Bob Trevino” seems to be a form of “Marty” for the Web age, with the 2 lead actors interlocking in a wonderful method.
I began off as an enormous fan of John Leguizamo, within the days of his earliest Off Broadway one-man exhibits (like “Mambo Mouth” and “Spic-O-Rama”), however within the film that first turned me on to him, the four-guys-in-the-Bronx drama “Hangin’ with the Homeboys” (1991), he didn’t have that Leguizamo brashness; he performed the equal of the Ron Howard character in “American Graffiti.” And he was improbable. That’s the Leguizamo we see right here. He makes Bob a quiet man of churning feeling who, on the similar time, is so honest that he can’t assist however reveal himself. Leguizamo instills Bob with a touching tenderness. One of many many horrible tales from Lily’s childhood has to do with a canine that was taken away from her, and when Bob brings her to a pound and invitations her to cradle a pooch who may have been that canine, you’re seeing a four-hankie film scene, however the movie earns it; and if it doesn’t get to you, you’re most likely the form of one who would take a canine from a toddler.
Bob is drawn to Lily as a result of she’s so clearly flailing; he can’t not assist her. She razzes him — for his dangerous jokes, and for his really terrible basketball dribbling. He tells her that “we’re all a bit damaged,” as they wait at a camp website to see the July meteors he ritually needs upon. He’s proper, however his actual message is which you can’t let your damaged life simply sit there. You’ve obtained to search out some instruments and repair it.
“Bob Trevino Likes It,” which opens at this time, has had a journey into theaters that’s reasonably emblematic. A yr in the past, on the 2024 version of SXSW, it gained the Grand Jury Award and the Viewers Award within the Narrative Characteristic classes. For a small indie drama, that’s hitting the jackpot. But right here we’re a yr later; it took that lengthy for the movie to open on 4 screens in New York and L.A. And although it’s obtained two identify stars, I don’t sense some main visibility quotient. Within the ’90s, a film like this one may need had an opportunity to catch on. In its small-scale method, it’s a crowd-pleaser. (It’s 3 times as convincing as “Between the Temples.”) However whether or not you see it with a crowd or not, “Bob Trevino Likes It” leaves you grateful to be within the firm of characters who make being misplaced, and healed, this actually affecting.
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