FILM REVIEW: "Bob Trevino Likes It" is a strange, stilted self-validation
“Bob Trevino Likes It” finishes off a solid Perth Film Festival on a remarkably low note. The film is doing well overseas and in America, and audiences like it. It’s also massively exciting to see an independent film focusing on trauma and healing resonating with crowds worldwide. I, for one, am experiencing a major dissonance with audience reactions and my own experience. Flynn Le Cornu does not likes it.
The plot follows the sweet sentiment of a daughter by chance and then by design as she stumbles on a replacement father figure. The one she starts out with is absent, exploitative, and narcissistically immature. It's apparently based on Tracie Laymon’s real, lived experience. It’s a well-intentioned attempt to explain that sometimes, people can’t change even if you need them to, and that you have to spend the time you have with people who care about you. It’s the kind of pragmatic, self-empowering narrative that I’m sure it might have work if executed well.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Scene by scene, the film unfolds with increasingly contrived and formulaic attempts at evoking the same sequence of pity and juvenile sentimentalism until it becomes hard not to laugh when the characters cry. If you want to know how to invert the Human empathetic impulse, “Bob Trevino…” is your guide. Compositionally, for example, whenever the protagonist experiences an intense emotion, the lens changes and the composition snaps to a close-up for the rest of the conversation with whoever created the problem for her. This happens once. And then again. And then again. And then you realise that’s the film. This recurs ad infinitum, with the same formula. Consequently, you start looking for something new in the shot, and then you start looking around the theatre, before realising the senior crowd is eating it up. For the fourth time in a row. Maybe that’s who it’s for.
All credit to Barbie Ferreira (phenomenal in Euphoria), who plays the titular Lily Trevino. It would be impossible to perform as many different kinds of “extremely upset”, as the camera movement is asking for. As an audience member, my focus is broken as I wait for some new level of depth or variation in the motif. But no – it serves its function as signifier (“This is the part where you’re supposed to be upset, audience.”), and then leaves it on screen for the rest of the scene. Much of Bob Trevino… is like this, seemingly so devoid of nuance that it seems unbelievable it really happened. Even more unbelievable is the fact that the writer lived this story and still went on to represent it with so little depth or stylism.
The whole thing feels like some exercise in personal revisionism. If this was supposed to teach audiences that an inadequate family is not a one-off thing, that we’re not alone even if we’re born alone, then maybe the script could’ve been slightly more subjectively open. More universal, maybe? Look, it’s my role here to break down what does and doesn’t work, but it’s hard to nail down. one thing It’s an atmosphere of ham-fisted single interpretation that suggests myopic direction. The depiction of anybody who does not serve the impossibly hard done-by protagonist comes across almost vengefully, cartoonishly unlikable. Even Lily Trevino’s best friend, Daphne (Lauren Spencer) totally vanishes from the film until it’s time to progress the character’s introspective self-empowerment.
The only rule of the film is that nothing happens unless it moves the story toward the next ‘cute’ situation that the script forces into action by way of unlikely, plot-serving coincidences. The main character is the only one who undergoes any change. Even then, I took note of a total of one actual choice Lily made with the lesson she learned. This movie was probably cathartic for Laymon to create – a total self-validation for the pain she experienced growing up – and a very clean immortalisation of never having to interrogate the actual cause of her father’s failure. For me, it was a slow-going, one-note pity party which worked better on paper.
