Movie Review
How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer
Riding in cars with boys, that’s how

by Mary Damiano

Steven Bauer and Elizabeth Pena in How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

There are a couple of ways to take How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer. You could look at it as a langorously paced coming of age story. Or, you could look at it as a cure for insomnia.

Either way you’d be right. The film, the story of three generations of Latina women and their encounters with boys and cars over one summer, has been on the film festival circuit since 2005. One reason it might be getting released now is that it features a pre-Ugly Betty America Ferrara, and we all know how hot she is right now.

The Garcia girls live in a tiny Peyton Place kind of town in Arizona, where everybody knows everybody and everybody’s business. Widow Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo) is the grandma in this family of women. As the film opens, she gets all her money out of her hiding places all over the house and goes and buys herself a truck. Never mind that she doesn’t know how to drive. The truck unnerves daughter Lolita, (Elizabeth Pena) the lonely but proud owner of a butcher shop. Lolita is the divorced mom of Blanca (Ferrera) a high school junior who’s feeling her oats with a certain mechanic named Sal (Leo Minaya).

When Lolita refuses to teach her mom how to drive, she accepts lessons from her burly lawn guy Don Pedro (Jorge Cervera) and rumors fly about the two being an item. Lolita has her own car troubles in the form of flirtatious, married Victor Reyes (Steven Bauer) who goes as far as to break her windshield so she’ll have to accept a ride home with him. And Blanca is trying to figure out whether or not boys only want one thing during her car rides with Sal.

Victor Wolf and America Ferrera

Writing all that, I can understand how Garcia Girls got made. It sounds great on paper, although it sounds funnier on paper than the way it comes out in the movie. And when all is said and done, it has some good performances and original moments. Dona Genoveva’s storyline is an original, because, just like her granddaughter, she’s experiencing her own coming of age, and that’s something we don’t often see in films.

The problem with How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer is that it moves at a snail’s pace—slower, actually, a snail’s pace would have snapped things up a bit. It’s more than two hours long, and it could have easily been tightened and shorn of half an hour.

This must be an extremely personal film for director Georgina Garcia Reidel, because it has that precious quality that probably kept her from cutting anything. There is a lot of good stuff here. But just because it’s called How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer doesn’t mean it should feel like it takes all summer to watch.

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer
Rated R
Running Time: 128 minutes
English and Spanish, with occasional subtitles
Written and directed by Georgina Garcia Reidel. Starring America Ferrera, Elizabeth Pena, Lucy Gallardo, Steven Bauer, Jorge Cervera, Leo Minaya