I Should Be Studying . . . So More Movie Reviews!

Maria Full of Grace
Starring: A lot of people with Spanish names that I don't feel like looking up on IMDB.

I first caught wind of this film when I saw the trailer before a showing of "Super Size Me" in Midtown Atlanta last year. Looked interesting enough, and it comes from the good people at HBO Films, a newer studio that is (of course) affiliated with the Premium channel. Knowing that I was seeing a non-mainstream film in a non-mainstream place, the non-mainstream trailer by the non-mainstream studio seemed oddly relevant. I missed it in the theaters, but when the Oscars rolled around and "Maria" was nominated, I put it on my list. However, I still didn't see this film until Sunday. Overall, it was pretty good, but tragically, nothing special.

Here's my thoughts. If you don't like foreign films or reading subtitles, don't see "Maria Full of Grace." The DVD doesn't come with dubbing options, so you have to read or listen to the movie in Spanish. I count several foreign films (City of God, Life is Beautiful, and Amelie) among my favorites, so I wasn't scared away. But the movie isn't so good that subtitle-Nazis should be forced to sit and watch it. Going into the film, I had little pre-conceived notions. I knew the general plot, so it seemed odd that the filmmakers would title a movie about a girl carrying drugs in her stomach with a Catholic phrase referring to the Virgin Mary carrying the messiah. I'm not easily offended, however, so I remained interested in the set-up: a girl, hoping to make money for her poor family, with a dream of making it to the US, takes a job as one of the infamous drug "mules." In Columbia and Mexico, drug cartels are renown for their creative techniques aimed at getting their product into the US market. Long gone are the days where false-bottomed vans snuck in Mom's nose candy. DEA and Customs Agents have found bibles made of cocaine, prosthetic arms and legs filled with heroin (still attached to their limbless owners), and an 8 mile underground tunnel that led to a fireplace in a just-over-the-border Texas home. The drug mule example, however, is an example that is much more heinous and shocking than comical. Young girls, usually around the age of 15-25, are given small "pellets," which are just condoms filled with drugs, to swallow. Depending on their size, they each ingest several dozen of these pellets a piece. Then, it's off for the United States, where the girls are met to, um, excrete the contents of their stomach so it can be sold to Joe and Jane Junkie. The risks are clear. Should only one pellet break open, the girl will most certainly overdose to death. Should the girl excrete one of the pellets early or otherwise not deliver the full payload, the lives of herself and her family (still back home) are jeopardized. Of course, she can also get caught by Uncle Sam. Even should she succeed, she's a drugrunner now and can still fall prey to any of the other misfortunes common to such a world. Duh, drugs are a dangerous business.

So that's the general plot. The only caveat is Maria, our "heroine" (sorry about the pun), is pregnant. This does little to the story except save her ass when the Customs Agents can't X-Ray her following their suspicions. It also contributes to her decision to be a mule - the cliched "better life for my child" motivation. There are some other plot points which would give away the other 10% of the movie, so I'll refrain, because that 10% is about the only thing you don't expect coming in. To be truthful, and this is certainly a compliment, "Maria Full of Grace" feels like a plotline left out of the movie "Traffic." It takes the same "these are the casualties of the Drug Trade/War on Drugs" focus and simply brings it to a story that hadn't been told in that film.

The positive stuff: the actress, Catalina Sandino Moreno, is great. She's a hot Latina mama (first movie review anywhere to use that phrase!), and fully deserved her Oscar nomination. But she didn't deserve to win. Hers is a great breakthrough performance, but nothing more. Of course, with foreign films you can't fully appreciate acting in a language you don't speak. For all I know, she could have been saying "drug mule" in a way that makes her the new Meryl Streep. Another positive thing is the film lacks what I'd call "purposeful dramatics." It really shows the experiences of Maria and her fellow mules as they happen - no sappy music setting in, odd camera angles, etc. Sometimes those things are effective, but "Maria" is and should be effective without these things. A split-second image of a blood-streaked bathtub is filmed in the same way as an earlier kissing scene. They just turned a camera on and let the actors and the script do the rest. Movies can be great when the cinematography is innovative and fresh, but others work best without the dress-up.

On the negative side, the big problem with this movie is the writing. The plot is, as mentioned, very simple and offers little more than you would expect once you figure out the plot. The writers failed to build on a premise that is just dying to horrify the audience. Moments that are meant to be suspenseful are often not suspenseful enough, as you can predict plot twists long before they happen. The character development is very poor, as well. Maria is turned into a mule by the 30-minute mark, and there's so little time spent focusing on what events led to her decision that it is hard to sympathize with or understand it. The way she becomes a mule is also unsympathetic - a biker who picks her up while hitchhiking randomly brings it up when he finds out how poor she is. You'd think this would be a key scene for the filmmakers and the audience, and it is not treated as such. Also, the ending, which I won't give away, is puzzling. More or less, it revolves around a decision Maria makes which, while not detracting from the plot, is not supported by it either. It really seems like the writers rolled the dice on some of the choices they have the characters making. Customs Agents catch Maria in a lie, one of her fellow smugglers, and essentially know what she is, but they still let her go. This is a plot necessity - the movie would end otherwise - but even plot points which are necessary should be somewhat logical if you're trying (as they are here) to make this movie as real as possible. In an early scene, Maria, while deciding whether to accept her "mission," attempts to convince a friend not to be a mule. In practically the very next scene, however, she decides to be a mule herself.

The movie's structure is also uneven. I'm not big on structure in movies, anyway, but this film chooses to employ a 3-Act structure, and I have to make the value judgment call that it was done poorly. The 3 Acts all have the same tone, but proceed at very uneven and different paces. New characters are introduced throughout, with little background or development, and the writers apparently expect you to sympathize with them anyway. And perhaps the most unfortunate thing is that the "harrowing" moments of the film, which are among its strongest points, still often fall short. Some of this is due to what I mentioned earlier about how easy it is to foresee most of the plot twists. And though earlier I praised the lack of "glossing," this is a movie that lives and dies on its tense moments and emotional involvement. Perhaps a bit of "glossing" - flashbacks of Maria's family back home, visions of what would happen if a pellet broke in her stomach, whatever - may have given some of those scenes the "punch" they needed to be great, not just good. In all truth, I still think they would've hurt more than helped. Regardless, the script and language barrier are the likely culprits of why "Maria Full of Grace" will not involve or entrap you. If you don't have some emotional intensity to involve the audience, then they will not sympathize with your characters or their choices, and anything that happens to them will seem hollow and uneventful.

I hate ending with the negative points, so I'll just say "Maria Full of Grace" is not a terrible, or even below average, film. It's only "pretty good." I hate to say this pejoratively, but this is the kind of story that should really hit viewers in the stomach. A beautiful young girl, pregnant and poor, is trapped, and her only way out puts her right in the middle of the dangerous drug trade. She risks her life for the chance of a better life - a way out. Everything is at stake, and the risks Maria takes are unimagineable to all of us. Yet, we all know these things at the outset. When I sat down to watch "City of God," which is similar in theme and plot, I came out realizing that I couldn't expect everything else I saw. Thus, the Achilles heel of "Maria Full of Grace" is that it doesn't build on what you already know and expect. "Traffic" showed us the drug perspective from all sides - white suburbanites, Mexican cops, abusers, informants, and the Drug Czar himself. "Maria" simply plays out a perspective and balances it against nothing. Everyone knows you must be in a terrible place in life to be a drug mule, and we can all assume that it would be a harrowing ordeal. So when you see a movie about this topic, you want to know "What else?" "City of God" and "Traffic" gave long, gripping, answers to this question. Maria doesn't. It's a shame.

Rating: 6.5/10.

If you like "Maria Full of Grace," you'll love/I'm Reminded Of: "Traffic," one of my all-time faves; "Requiem for a Dream," a good film that is a taxing, horrific ordeal to watch, "Midnight Express" (Late 70s film written by Oliver Stone that is amazing and based on a true story of a drug smuggler, yet unknown to most of our generation), and "Blow" (if you're looking for a happy-go-lucky drug smuggling story)


More to come ... I'm running out of things to distract me from studying.