Tall Girl (2019)

Jodi Kreyman has been tall since she was three, and the film opens with the accumulated indignities of that condition: the slouching, the jokes, the boys who will not look up. Her arc is a body-acceptance parable, handled with sincerity. The complication is that the body in question is height, a trait carrying none of the cultural freight the genre usually assigns to such stories, so the lesson arrives pre-softened. Netflix released it in 2019 to mixed notices, and a sequel followed in due course. Nzingha Stewart directs with a clean, unobtrusive competence.

The ensemble is diverse in a manner that feels lived-in. Black performers occupy real roles, the director is a Black woman, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for any of it. That restraint is worth something. Equally notable is what the film declines to engage: there is no queer presence at all, the romances running strictly boy-meets-girl. Race is present on screen and absent as a subject. Climate, class, and the economic order go unmentioned, which for a Netflix teen romance is neither surprising nor damning.

The climax arrives at homecoming, where Jodi delivers a speech about standing tall, a mild moral delivered with a straight face. Most of the message is carried by plot instead of podium, which keeps the sermonizing brief and tolerable. The final image, a boy producing a milk crate so he can reach her, is the film's best idea. It is a small, tidy, harmless picture that knows its lane and stays in it.