Gringa

Gravitas Ventures | Release Date: April 21, 2023

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hnestlyontheslyMay 22, 2023

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. As a competitive soccer movie, it’s hard not to compare anything to Ted Lasso, which tread a new path by boldly losing as often as they played. Seeing the San Marcos players make it into the Friendship Cup with a walk-on gringa for a month of games to go on to beat her old American high school team feels a little too on the nose. The tournament is a bit strange, too: a single game, no brackets. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter because the point is that winning shows growth. Little things like that are needless blemishes to an otherwise soulful dramedy. Jackson says himself, “You don’t surf the first day,” so why do we need to win the tournament in the first month?

Probably the most irritating decision in the film is the fact that Margie identifies herself, as does all the promotional material for the film, as “Large Marge,” someone ungainly and unsightly, which is fine, there’s lots of good reasons why fat folks should have more time on screen telling stories we don’t normally get to hear, but Jess Gabor is not. She is conventionally beautiful in every way – though she does a good job trying to Zendaya slouch her way through the film. It’s not a problem that’s unique to Gringa and any number of John Hughes movies have committed the same sin for the purpose of the grand makeover scene (fun fact: there are two more videos on Google called “ASMR Mean Girl Gives You a Makeover” than I thought there were before I started this review). It’s no one’s fault and there isn’t an easy way to introduce Margie’s bulimia without having some sort of reference to her dysphoria. Her mom pushes back a little on her self-characterization at the beginning, but there are too many other kids and adults who confirm Margie’s dysphoria for it to feel like a focalized, unreliable self-assessment. It’s just hard because the same girl who claims she’s large also is the reason why the San Marcos girls win the championship, so which is it? Is she an athlete or is she fat? We never really get any resolution.

Similarly, there’s this fantasy element of Jackson’s existence in San Marcos which is just a little bit strange: his perceived impoverished simplicity. We see him subsisting off of little odd jobs here and there, mostly surfing, and yet he lives in a spacious one bedroom with running water (in the bathroom) and enough money to buy enough beer to get himself drunk every night. He says to his daughter at one point, “Last month I was a drunk soccer coach, with not a peso to my name, and now I’m a single father with not a peso to my name.” So maybe he means that it all goes to rent? Or maybe he’s being a little dishonest in talking about how he’s received a sweet deal to live rent-free in someone else’s pad, but just like how Margie’s expenses are magically taken care of (at one point she coughs up $1000 to cross the border without much explanation, since her mom had so little money they had to live in one of the houses she was selling, so where did it come from?). It’s not the biggest annoyance, but it does go against some of the edenic innocence of Jackson’s existence. He crafts himself as a man unmoored, yet he clearly must have needs and work requirements that make him more responsible than he casts himself. It’s just that those responsibilities are not, to him or the film’s screenwriters, the same skills that would allow him to be a responsible father. That’s fine, but don’t make his finances central to his story if he’s going to go around stuffing church money into stranger’s pockets when he’s done an afternoon of honest work–he needs that for food! It looks weird to have the one white guy in town throwing cash and labor around whenever he feels like it, claiming to be rich in spirit, and then coming around later to say he’s poor as a pauper. (Last point on this, but there’s a moment when Margie’s mom is on a business call and her client says they should “put in an offer, “but its clear that she’s representing a planned development company,” which doesn’t seem like it would need her to put in an offer on every individual unit. Is that how that actually works? Aren’t there fixed prices on those things? Why does every unit get sold at a different price when she’s the one selling them?)

Which is not to say that Gringa is not full of wonderful little moments. Judy Greer’s cameo makes a play for mom of the decade, and Steve Zahn finds a balance between being delicate and gruff in his treatment of his daughter. The script does not dwell on the past but inspects the present, as we watch some predictable but still exciting developments in Margie’s life occur over the course of the four weeks she’s in San Marcos. Waiting on the steps of the bus station for Margie’s bus is one of the most tense and wonderful moments of the festival this week.… Expand

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