Did you know the average height for a woman in the US is 5 feet, 4 inches? You could say I’m above average. All jokes aside, I’m 5’9,” which makes me four inches shorter than the lead character in Netflix’s new movie Tall Girl. So, here’s a picture of me in high school:
I’ve been 5’9” since middle school. I grew up being taller than most teachers, almost every girl in the school and about 75% of the guys in my class. That, combined with the fact that I could lift pretty much everybody I’ve ever met, led to me feeling pretty gross.
I’m kind of used to not having many people like me being shown as anything but the butt of a joke and feeling very unfeminine just for existing in my natural form for my entire life. Considering this, you can imagine how I felt when I saw Ava Michelle stand up while talking to a guy in the library and towering over him.
Her character, Jodi, is 6’1” and for the guy who looked about 5’10” before he noped out of there, must have thought she looked very similar to the above-mentioned movie poster.
Now, Jodi is cute even in her sweatshirt and Nikes, she’s a smart cookie, and she has some decent conversational skills. Even with all her good qualities, that tall thing just keeps getting in her way.
If you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll leave you here with a picture of me from Prom (wearing flats so as to stay shorter than my prom date… and his ego, of course) so you don’t read too far into the spoilers and hate me for a couple days.
For those of you who are still with me, I’ve got some things to say about what I liked about this movie, after putting this through my infamous critical feminist lens that my family hates at dinner conversations.
Characters
The fact that almost every main character (except maybe the she-devil, Kimmy) goes through some sort of change is amazing. In a lot of rom-coms about a girl who just needs to love and accept herself, no one around her even realizes that they need to sit down and think about their motivations.
Dunkers starts out as kind of a “sad-boy-longing-after-the-manic-pixie-dream-girl” type of person, even considering the fact that the girl is hella taller than him and kind of obsessively asks her out. Yikes. But eventually, he realizes that he needs to give his best friend some room to breathe, and that he needs to get over the fact that she isn’t interested in him. And then he does something really sweet: he gets her some heels from a drag shop so that once she finds her perfect tall man, she can wear them to her date, therefore symbolically giving up on romancing Jodi and stepping up to be a great friend.
Stig, the hot Swedish exchange student who went from being a small fish in a big pond to being a big fish in a small pond, gets a little lost on his quest to be Ingvar Krueger for a year and ends up breaking Jodi’s heart and trust before Dunkers calls him out on his BS. After he chases down Jodi to apologize and ask for a second chance, he gracefully accepts her rejection, which I appreciated as a woman who is attracted to men and has had a Tinder.
Family Roles
Now in most rom-coms, the parents are pretty absent. Their main role is for the dad to pull a “get the hell away from my daughter” and then ignore her until the end of the movie, while the mom is tasked with giving wise talk that fully changes the character’s perspective on something and starts the spite glow-up. Siblings usually just mess up the main character’s life or are the catalyst to all the conflict of the movie (sending private letters, anyone?)
In Tall Girl, though, Jodi’s family is pretty consistently there for her. There’s even a really cute scene after Stig stands Jodi up and she’s at her lowest where her dad starts playing a song on the piano, and she comes out of her room to join in, although neither one has to talk about it.
The mom and sister only try to give her a makeover after she asks, and they still manage to polish Jodi up to what she wants to be instead of making a second, much taller Harper (her sister).
The Final Pairing
It is a rom-com, so of course we have a final pairing. Normally I hate the whole “escaping the friend-zone” cliché, especially because the term friend zone implies that something is owed to the person who occupies it, but Dunkleman doesn’t escape from the friend-zone. He put himself in the real friendship zone, and Jodi decides she does like him in a romantic way even after he backs off.
And we can’t forget to talk about the milk crate thing! Cheesiest thing I’ve ever seen, and it restored my will to live. He carried it around just for her so she could be kissed like an average-sized girl! Like, I’ll be thinking about that level of commitment for years, right up until I either find my Dunkers or get a cat and live my own best life.
So, for every tall girl out there reading this article, who might like a shorter guy but feels a little weird about it…
GET HIM A MILK CRATE SIS, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY!
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