Found with a close friend while surfing Netflix last Friday, Tall Girl is a typical teen movie about a girl named Jodi from New Orleans who is socially ostracized from her high school for one absurd reason: standing at 6 foot 1, Jodi is deemed the “nerd” of her school because of her height. Everything changes for her once she gets caught up in a love triangle with handsome exchange student Stig and popular queen bee Kimmy. Through new experiences and classic high school struggles, Jodi learns to embrace her height and discover new levels of self-confidence she would never conceptualize in the first place. 

While the intentions were in the right place, I disapprove of the way Tall Girl conceptualizes the idea of self love and body positivity. Being tall was not just Jodi’s differentiating characteristic, but seen as a major flaw for most of the movie. The movie certainly takes the importance of Jodi’s height way too far, from showing blatant disappointment from Jodi’s parents to severe bullying in Jodi’s high school. This negative perspective on height does not change until the end of the movie, but when Jodi finally stands up for herself, the message is not “I am still beautiful and love myself no matter what height I am” but “I am tall; this is my identity and I cannot change that; it is something I need to learn how to deal with”. No matter how much the movie attempts to fix the offensive tall-people jokes spread throughout 75% of the movie, I as a viewer still walked away with the impression that people who created this movie believe height to be a defining aspect among women. 

Besides that glaring issue, the movie had nothing special or interesting to offer. The plot was stereotypical and predictable. The characters were cookie cutter and ironically “quirky”. I would not really recommend this movie to anyone on the basis that the lack of body positivity is disquieting; however if you want something that is easy to turn on in the background while studying I recommend this movie.