Bob Trevino Likes It: An Annoyingly Compulsive People-Pleaser of a Movie
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
The movie Bob Trevino Likes It opens with the protagonist, 25-year-old Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), weeping because she has just discovered, via an accidental text, that her boyfriend is cheating on her.
The boyfriend never appears in the film or really matters. He’s just one more bad thing that happens in Lily’s life as a compulsive people pleaser.
There will be many more shedding of tears before the film is over. Based on the personal experiences of writer-director Tracie Laymon, Bob Trevino Likes It also has enough cringey jokes to qualify as a comedy, making it a hybrid feel-good tearjerker (or a tear-good feel-jerker?)
Barbie Ferreira in Bob Trevino Likes it
The formula apparently works: The film has won best narrative feature at almost a dozen film festivals to date — but in my case the strongest feeling was annoyance at the painfully manipulative script.
Bob Trevino Likes It features two Bob Trevinos. The first Bob Trevino (French Stewart) is Lily’s monstrously self-centred father, a womanizer and cheapskate, who abruptly ghosts his own daughter after they have an argument. Dad, who has somehow blamed Lily for his drug-abusing wife’s departure years before, treats her with indifference bordering on contempt. In therapy, Lily describes her miserable life story in her default chipper tone. When she concludes, she feels obliged to console the young woman therapist, who has been left a sobbing mess.
Enter the other Bob Trevino, a lonely, sensitive 50-year-old married man (John Leguizamo) whom Lily inadvertently connects to on Facebook thinking it might be her dad.
In a short time, Bob Trevino 2 becomes her substitute dream father, telling corny jokes, liking all her Facebook posts and even unclogging the toilet in the house where Lily lives as a personal support worker. For a meagre living, she takes care of an empathic young African-American woman, Daphne (Lauren “Lola” Spencer) who has a degenerative disability but is magically upbeat. Daphne’s purpose in the the film is to teach Lily how to express her repressed feelings.
The nice Bob Trevino has a wife, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones) who you might think would be concerned about her husband growing close to a young strange woman he met on the Internet. But no, she has fanatically devoted herself to the world of scrapbooking to deal with an emotional trauma in her life, the death of an infant child.
Bob devotes his time to his work at his construction contractor’s job, spending weekends in the company trailer, doing office work and keeping files on safety violations by his boss because he’s a good person.
You may well imagine that nice Bob Trevino is secretly a con artist, a serial killer, or at least a needy middle-aged man creeping on a young woman. But no, the twist is no twist: Bob is as nice as Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and just as asexual. He just really likes helping people. Or, as Bob says, helpfully: “I like helping people.”
In this world of so much caring and sharing (with a puppy, and funny dancing and meteor showers), I found myself eager for the intermittent screen appearance by French Stewart as the a-hole dad, Bob Trevino, in encounters of malevolence vs innocence that recall Marv Newland’s classic Bambi Meet Godzilla cartoon.
That the movie also inspires more wholesome feelings is entirely thanks to Ferreira (Euphoria), whose character communicates enough warmth, energy and emotional fragility to make even a doubtful curmudgeon soften a little.
Bob Trevino Likes It. Written and directed by Tracie Laymon. Stars Barbie Ferreira, John Leguizamo, French Stewart, Lauren “Lola” Spencer and Rachel Bay Jones. Currently running this week at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto and rolls out to the rest of Canada on March 28.