A comedy-drama in Girl in Progress

Review by Jenny Alvarez

Photo By Alfonso de Elias.

Eva Mendes plays Grace, a single mother working two jobs who has no time to help her daughter grow up. She is too busy juggling work, bills, and the very married Dr. Harford, to give her daughter, Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez) the attention she desperately needs. When Ansiedad’s English teacher, Ms. Armstrong, introduces her students to classic coming-of-age stories, Ansiedad is inspired to skip adolescence and jump-start her life without mom. While Grace becomes preoccupied with the increasing affections of her co-worker, Mission Impossible (Eugenio Derbez), Ansiedad enlists the help of her loyal friend, Tavita, to plot her shortcut to “adulthood”. But as her misguided plan unravels, Ansiedad and Grace must learn that sometimes growing-up means acting your age.

This movie is something you don’t see every day, She is a parent with good intentions that fails to exhibit good behavior. Ansiedad researches adolescent rites of passage and maps them out on her bulletin board, planning to demonstrate potential and blow it and infiltrate the popular crowd and betray her best friend and lose her virginity in the course of a couple weeks.