Frida Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 25th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
FRIDA
Directed by Julie Taymor
Rated R, 124 minutes
Biographical movies have a built-in handicap: they don't tell a story, they recount a series of selective incidents and interactions with famous people. The result is almost always stilted, tidied up, and blazed with knowing winks and nudges.
"Frida", the long-awaited film on the life of the Mexican painter and feminist icon with the formidable eyebrow, does not escape these pitfalls. But it manages pretty well in spite of them. Some of this success is due to the passionate caring of star/producer Salma Hayek, who wrestled the project away from weightier opponents Madonna and Jennifer Lopez and got it made. Some comes from a supporting cast dominated by Alfred Molina's cuddly oversized bear of a Diego Rivera, the great muralist who was Frida's mentor, sparring partner, and sometime husband. And much of what raises this movie for brief gulps of air above the banalities of the biopic comes from director Julie Taymor, whose triumphant Broadway version of "The Lion King" and her somewhat less triumphant but still striking movie "Titus" were both distinguished by her brilliant visual panache.
The bare bones of "Frida" are familiar to her legions of fans, and a mangled lot of bones they are. The defining moment in her life came when, as a teenager, she was horribly injured in a trolley accident, a scene which Taymor stages with a terrible beauty. Improbably surviving, young Frida was cocooned in a body cast and strapped to a bed for long agonizing months. Her parents (Roger Rees and Patricia Reyes Spindola) bought her art supplies and rigged a mirror above her bed so she could paint and use herself as a model, a focus to which she remained faithful throughout her life.
When she has recovered enough to get around on crutches, she limps with canvases tucked under her arm to where Rivera is painting a mural, and gets him to come down and critique her work. It my have happened just like that in life, but here the movie camera feels like the unmistakable third principal in the scene. It's a cinematic self-consciousness that "Frida" never completely manages to shake.
Kahlo was a more interesting person than this film lets on, with its tendency to nudge her toward the suffering soap opera heroine who would have lived in happy monogamy with her husband if only his unbridled womanizing hadn't pushed her to retaliate with womanizing (and manizing) of her own. Hayak does a respectable job as Frida, and certainly adds heft to her acting portfolio, although beyond spunkiness and pain lie depths of the character that she never manages to explore. Some of this comes from a reluctance to surrender the cinema diva's prerogative of beauty. She yields to the famous eyebrow, but not the mustache. She moves seamlessly from being scarcely able to walk to doing an erotic tango with Italian photographer Tina Modotti (played by Ashley Judd with fluent body language but halting Italian.) And Frida slides into a diverting naked embrace with cabaret star Josephine Baker with a sensuous perfection that bears little trace of the battered, twisted, 35-times-operated-on little frame that was her real-life burden.
Molina is irresistible as Rivera, the corpulent mountain of artistic talent and fleshly delights who was Frida's other burden as well as her joy and inspiration. He plays the political passion and artistic genius that shaped the great man, and he makes us understand the sexual catnip that drew women to him in droves. But equally impressive is the work by Roger Rees as Frida's father, who creates a character so sympathetic that the movie loses a wheel when it carelessly misplaces him in the interests of covering the prefab biographical armature.
It is in its visuals that "Frida" shines. Taymor draws on her formidable bag of wonder to create fanciful theatrical scenes that morph out of Kahlo's paintings or tap into Kahlo's imagination. Some are playful, some are painful, some are exuberant. But Taymor's eye also enriches the more mundane setups with color and imagery that lift this movie out of the mundane.
The script, the work of a tag team of credited and uncredited writers (including Ed Norton, who portrays Nelson Rockefeller and is Hayak's off-screen swain), manages to cover the territory, but not always with style, and has a weakness for colorful bits of site-specific dialogue like "He's a big Mexican piņata filled with enough candy for everyone."
Despite its shortcomings, "Frida" fills the theater with enough arresting imagery, enough biographical information, enough artistic wonder, and enough vivid characterization to make the trip worthwhile. There was more to Frida Kahlo's personality and appetites and visions than meets the screen, more to her life and very likely more to her death than we are privy to here, but as Julie Taymor has observed, one of the agonies of the biopic is trying to sandwich a life into two hours.
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