Frida Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 18th, 2002
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Julie Taymor, the Tony-Award-winning director of the stage adaptation of The Lion King, made an auspicious feature-film debut a few years ago with Titus, a visually arresting take on Shakespeare's tragedy that was the greatest Peter Greenaway film never actually made by Greenaway. When I heard she was helming the big-screen adaptation of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's life story, my eyes practically salivated as I dreamed of even more hysterically exaggerated visuals.
Perhaps my expectations were too high, because Frida plays like a by-the-numbers artist presentation. In fact, I was downright surprised both at how conventional Taymor's take was and at its distressing lack of visual bravura. Don't get me wrong - there is some very powerful eye candy in the film. It just paled in comparison to both Titus and my near-rabid anticipation.
Based on Hayden Herrera's book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo and cooked up by at least four different screenwriters (one of the film's underlying problems, no doubt), Frida begins in true biopic fashion by showing Kahlo (Salma Hayek, Traffic) on the verge of checking out before it flashes back to 1922 Mexico City, where the young artist-to-be is portrayed as a free-spirited, sexually ambiguous student. An ill-fated bus trip and subsequent crash leaves Kahlo badly injured (it's a great scene, followed by an even better one in the hospital that looks like the Day of the Dead parade crossed with lost footage from Tool's "Sober" video), though it becomes the catalyst for her art. Told she'll never walk again, Kahlo begins to dabble in self-portraits (a mirror is hung above her bed) before a typically quick cinematic recovery.
Most of Frida is about Kahlo's tumultuous relationship with notoriously unfaithful muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina, TV's Bram & Alice), who first became her mentor, then her lover, and finally her husband. A bunch o f stuff happens with a lot of other celebrity types - Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush, The Banger Sisters), photographer Tina Modotti (a horribly miscast Ashley Judd, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), Rivera's rival David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas, Ballistic) and Nelson Rockefeller (Red Dragon's Edward Norton, who also has an uncredited script rewrite) - but none of it is too exciting, unless you're a fanatical Kahlo fan, though that demographic already knows what's coming. If the Rockefeller stuff seems familiar, it's because we saw the same thing played out a few years ago in Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock.
Thankfully, as the focus of the film becomes more about Kahlo's art, the visual stakes are raised, highlighted by a brilliant scene where she and Rivera take New York City by storm. While most of the brief celebrity cameos are flatly portrayed, both Hayek and Molina do great jobs in their roles, though the film lacks the strong lead performance of, say, an Ed Harris in Pollock. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably already heard about Hayek growing a moustache and a unibrow so she'd look more like Kahlo, showing a lot of skin and partaking in hot girl-on-girl action. This is all fine by me, but it made me wonder why, after going to these great lengths to make Frida more authentic, the film wasn't made in Spanish. I mean, it's not like Hayek is unfamiliar with the language. Also, much like last year's absurdly overrated A Beautiful Mind, there are a couple of omitted bits to make Frida an easier pill to swallow. Her sex life was much more risqué than what we see here (her and Rivera used to tag-team women) and there's no ambiguity about her death, which many believe came at her own hand.
2:00 - R for sexuality/nudity and language
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