Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Inspired by a true story from director Tracie Laymon, after a falling-out with her dad, Lily Trevino makes a connection with another ‘Bob Trevino’ on the internet, and they form a strange and beautiful friendship.
Poor Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) is a people pleaser, a girl who will bend over as far backwards as she can to help out others, especially her terrible father. Despite trying to date and have friends, Lily really has no one else other than her awful father, we will call him Dad-Bob (French Stewart) for the purposes of separating the two characters. And Dad-Bob gives a damn about one thing only: which silver-fox woman among many different choices he should exclusively date with the intention of “locking it down”, meaning I guess either getting a ring or getting laid. With Dad-Bob, either option is just as likely; gross.
Did I mention, Lily Trevino really has no-one else? She generally thinks of the woman that she acts as a live-in caretaker for, Daphne (Lauren ‘Lolo’ Spencer), as a full-time job rather than any kind of real companion, has no other friends to speak of, and Dad-Bob is simply trying to use Lily for whatever she can help him with, including being touted up for his dates. So when Lily’s attempts at wing-womaning Dad-Bob’s selected silver fox go inevitably awry and Dad-Bob blames her for the whole thing, Lily really is left all alone to cry about it while trolling the internet for attention. When suddenly, a mis-named connection presents a whole realm of possibilities.
Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo) is a good man, also a people pleaser but in a smilingly resigned kind of way, especially when his wife Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), immersed in her artistic obsession of scrapbooking, gently insists on expensive and fancy paper for her creative things. Bob is a lonely person too, despite being surrounded by others mostly at his construction management job, he and Jeanie haven’t really connected since the passing of their infant son some time ago. Jeanie even made a whole scrapbook for their baby boy, but Bob can’t bring himself to look at it or even talk to her, or anyone else really, about his very real loss as a father, and as a human in general. So when another Trevino starts messaging him about possibly being related after Bob ‘liked’ some of her memorabilia photos, threads of human connection begin to form, for once kind and nonjudgmental.
In an act of desperation due to a badly leaking toilet in Daphne’s place, Bob and Lily meet in person far sooner than expected, and Lily ends up apologetically introducing Bob as ‘her dad’ to Daphne while he’s pretzeled himself into the bathroom fixing the toilet – they do share the same name, after all. Lily and Bob go to lunch after and begin a series of awkward and charming get-togethers, where they exchange life stories and discover bits of what they were missing in their own lives, in each-other.
It has to be said just what an incredible job Leguizamo does in the role of Bob Trevino, at once tender and sorrowful, hesitant but compassionate, his character far more capable of being a dad than he initially thought. Leguizamo’s full range of acting is on gorgeous display in a role you wouldn’t expect to find him rocking like a boss.
Mentioning what goes on to happen to our cast of characters – Lily and her aching loneliness, Bob and his missed opportunities to be a real father figure, Dad-Bob and his self-centered petty bullsh*t, Jeanie and her repressed love for both her gone child and absent husband – would be a huge disservice to the audience. Instead, for a surprisingly genuine feel-good movie about the family we make around ourselves that has nothing at all to do with bloodlines, catch Bob Trevino Likes It now!