Taglines: Lessons in motherhood. Taught by a kid.
Grace (Eva Mendes)is a single mom raising her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ansiedad. Grace is busy juggling work, bills and her relationship with the married Dr. Hartford, leaving Ansiedad to take care of herself as well as her mother most of the time.
When Ansiedad’s English teacher inspires her with coming-of-age lessons, Ansiedad decides it’s time to rebel and grow up quickly so she will finally be mature enough to move out. She creates a list of tasks she must complete to reach her big goal: run away to New York. Her first task is to remind everyone that she is a good girl – she signs up for her school’s chess team and wins a match, and goes to a nursing home and regularly visits an old woman who Anisedad names ‘Maud’.
Next, Ansiedad must befriend the most popular girl in school, Valerie. After much humiliation and bribery, Ansiedad successfully completes this task, but is forced to act terrible toward her best friend, Tavita, to make this happen, calling her fat and useless. Tavita begins to cry from Ansiedad’s harsh comments and runs off to her boyfriend, Ferguson.
Ansiedad witnesses Ferguson harshly breaking up with Tavita, telling her that what they do in his basement will never mean they will be together. After Ferguson storms away, a crying Tavita tells Ansiedad that she was never there for her, and that she hates her.
Ansiedad moves onto her next tasks, requiring her to have her first kiss and lose her virginity. For these tasks, she targets one of the most popular boys in school, the so-called womanizer Trevor. She confirms that he’ll be at a particular party that night, then asks him to take her virginity there. He agrees, and they kiss awkwardly. Ansiedad checks “first kiss” off her list, disappointing Trevor, who thought that she might have liked him.
At the party, Trevor takes Ansiedad to an upstairs bedroom, much to Valerie’s anger. Locking the door, Trevor tells Ansiedad that he thinks she’s pretty, but she tells him off for being nice to her. Trevor then tells Ansiedad that he only acts as a womanizer to bug his dad, but Ansiedad tells him she doesn’t care. As she strips down and gets into bed, Anisiedad realizes how scared she is, changing her mind when a naked Trevor emerges from the bathroom. She quickly dresses and runs out where Valerie stops her and calls her a slut. The party guests refuse to believe Ansiedad’s protests that she and Trevor didn’t have sex which is made worse when Trevor yells out that they did. Ansiedad runs home, crying out for her mother, who is not home. She trashes the house in anger and cries until the next morning.
Film Review for Girl in Progress
A high school lesson plan calls for a study of coming of age. The teacher approaches this topic as if it’s uncharted territory for her teenage students. Maybe she’s right. A student named Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez) does some extra study outside class and begins a project to deliberately and consciously come of age.
Was it only a couple of weeks ago that the couples in “Think Like a Man” led their lives after studying Steve Harvey’s self-help book? I’ve only enjoyed one movie based on a self-help book: “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).” Come to think of it, there have also been some good films based on the Bible. What Ansiedad discovers is that she has to go on full alert for epiphanies, become aware of tensions between adults and children, lose her virginity and dump her best friend. The first three will likely occur by themselves, and the process of dumping her best friend is so mean-spirited, it casts a pall over several scenes.
Ansiedad’s mom is Grace (Eva Mendes), a woman with problems of her own. During days, she cleans house for the married Dr. Harford (Matthew Modine), and in the evenings, she’s a popular waitress at a clam shack in Vancouver (which of course is not identified; Canada is playing America again). Grace and the doctor are having an affair, and Grace should read a few more books before believing him when he says he’ll leave his wife and child and marry her.
Ansiedad’s best friend is the appealing Tavita (Raini Rodriguez), who is loyal, true and overweight. She’s one of those pals you should keep around instead of dumping because of some goofy theory about rites of passage. When and how Ansiedad dumps her is so stupidly cruel that the subplot undermines the film and does serious damage to the character.
Ansiedad has chosen who she wants to lose her virginity to. This is a character actually identified in the credits as Bad Boy (Richard Harmon). Attention, women! You should never sleep with a man whose only attribute is that you want to sleep with him. I should write a book of my own. Because Ansiedad is a smart charmer, and well-played by Cierra Ramirez, she should really be above this sort of thing — above the whole movie, really. It’s rather hard to accept her as a heroine when she’s treacherous to Tavita and shamelessly looking for stud service.
The movie, written by Hiram Martinez and directed by Patricia Riggen, finds parallels between the unwise relationships between Ansiedad and her mom, who both have unwise taste in men. The mom is not super-attentive to her daughter, which is why the kid is driven to grow up by studying books. Eva Mendes is another actress too good for this movie. I should add that the clam shack is also too good. It’s another one of those movie restaurants where the regulars know everybody; it supplies the stage on which their lives are led.
I wonder if I’ve been coming across as a moralist recently. In reviewing Bobcat Goldthwait’s “God Bless America,” I felt it was necessary to point out that, gee, it’s not right to go around killing people, even if they do offend you on reality TV. Now I wonder what teenage girls the makers of “Girl in Progress” had in mind, and whether they actually consider it progress.
Girl in Progress is a 2012 American drama film directed by Patricia Riggen. The film received a limited release on May 11, 2012. The film received the Favorite Movie Award at the 2012 ALMA Awards, which honors the accomplishments made by Hispanics in film, television, and music. Cierra Ramirez won the Favorite Movie Actress Supporting Role Award.
Girl in Progress (2012)
Directed by: Patricia Riggen
Starring: Eva Mendes, Cierra Ramirez, Patricia Arquette, Matthew Modine, Eugenio Derbez, Raini Rodriguez, Jocelyne Loewen, Brenna O’Brien, Ana Maria Estrada, Kendall Cross, Robin Douglas
Screenplay by: Hiram Martinez
Production Design by: Linda Del Rosario, Richard Paris
Cinematography by: Checco Varese
Film Editing by: Dan Schalk
Costume Design by: Katia Stano
Set Decoration by: Denise Nadredre
Music by: Christopher Lennertz
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content including crude references, and drinking – all involving teens.
Distributed by: Rogue Pictures
Release Date: May 11, 2012
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