Maria Full of Grace (2004)
After Maria Alvarez quits her job at a Colombian sweatshop, she discovers she’s pregnant. Desperate for money, she becomes a drug mule, swallowing 62 pellets of heroin and flying to New York City with two other smugglers.
When they land, the smugglers are quarantined until they pass the pellets, but Lucy, one of her fellow smugglers dies when her pellet bursts. A panicked Maria runs away, briefly taking refuge with Lucy’s sister before returning the drugs to the smugglers for the promised money.
This is an effective dramatization of the reality of the drug trade. Most smugglers are either coerced or tempted by the opportunity to escape oppressing poverty. As horrifying as this reality may seem to most of us, for too many people it represents the easiest and best opportunity for a better life.
Swimming with Sharks (1994)
When Guy (Frank Whaley) mistakenly thinks he’s fired, he kidnaps his cruel and sadistic boss, Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey). Discovering Buddy is having an affair with his girlfriend Dawn (Michelle Forbes), Guy flies into dangerous fit of rage, but the smooth talking Buddy offers him a deal.
Spacey is well cast as a powerful, manipulative man, foreshadowing his magnificent work as Frank Underwood.
Michelle Forbes has been a ubiquitous TV presence in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Homicide: Life on the Street, 24, Battlestar Galactica, and True Blood. She’s good here, but better as a supporting player than a romantic lead.
This funny commentary about the lengths to which people will go for power and success reminds me of King of Comedy (1983), but it’s not quite as good.
Frida (2002)
When she was eighteen, Frida Kahlo (Selma Hayek) was in a horrifying automobile accident. During her long recovery, her father brought her a canvas and a passion for painting was born.
Her unconventional relationship with Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), her husband, occasional lover, sometime rival, and chief champion was the epitome of dysfunction.
When Nelson Rockefeller (Edward Norton) commissioned Rivera to paint Man at the Crossroads, the couple traveled to New York, but because of political disagreements, it was never completed and they returned to Mexico, humbled and frustrated.
Their marriage was dealt a serious blow when Rivera began an affair with Kahlo’s sister and their relationship remained strained until Rivera asked Kahlo to host Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) during his Russian exile. During his stay, Kahlo and Trotsky were lovers until his wife discovered their affair and demanded they leave. When Trotsky was later assassinated, Diego and Frida were interrogated as suspects.
The movie ends abruptly, but this echoes Kahlo’s life. Her long history of illness contributed to her premature death at 47.
Alfred Molina is excellent as Diego Rivera. He was in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and played Doc Ock in Spider-man 2 (2004), but this is his most realized role.
Geoffrey Rush seems like a poor choice to play the famed Russian revolutionary, but more than holds his own during his brief time in the film.
Ed Norton’s cameo as Nelson Rockefeller didn’t add anything to the narrative and felt like stunt casting.
Julie Taymor directed of the original production of The Lion King and the infamous production of Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark. Her other major film is The Beatles inspired Across the Universe (2007). She doesn’t seem like a good fit for a film about a Mexican iconoclast, but she did an excellent job, wisely foregrounding the art by starting several scenes as paintings which dissolve into live-action. This technique emphasized the relationship between Frida’s stormy life and her art.
This is the highlight is Hayek’s career, a good movie about a difficult woman, and turns Kahlo’s stormy relationship with Rivera into a grand opera. It mostly adheres to proven biographical formula, but creates enough pleasant surprises to distinguish it from other tortured artist films like Lust for Life (1956), or Pollock (2000).