All She Can
**/****
starring Corina Calderon, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Joseph Julian Soria, Julia Vera
screenplay by Daniel Meisel & Amy Wendel
directed by Amy Wendel
by Alex Jackson Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy–but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food, an oil rig, and the military; high-school senior Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon) is disenchanted with all three. Outside of school and her customer-service job at Whataburger, she devotes her life to competitive weightlifting. What's driving me nuts is that Garcia doesn't lift weights because she's seeking relief from her humdrum working-class existence and that's the only time she feels truly alive, as in Saturday Night Fever. No, Garcia doesn't even like lifting weights. She's only doing it because she's aiming to get a college scholarship and leave Benavides without incurring any student debt. What does she want to study? What does she want to be? If weightlifting isn't her dream, then what exactly is? Co-writer/director Wendel never gets around to asking these questions. She admires Garcia for her pragmatism and perseverance but is sheepish about the way her college goals are born almost exclusively out of a desire to distance herself from her working-class Mexican-American family. This culminates in an awkward plot development late in the film where Garcia helps a family of illegal aliens into San Antonio and then drives to confront the Admissions Dean at the University of Austin. Does this mean she's saying goodbye to her Mexican self? Coming to terms with it? It feels like superficial action cooked up by a filmmaker who's let political correctness sterilize all the tension organic to the material. The result is a piddling, rambling film that broaches social issues more than it explores them.
