Maria Full of Grace Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)July 17th, 2004
MARIA FULL OF GRACE (Maria llena eres de gracia)
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Fine Line Features
Grade: B+
Directed by: Joshua Marston
Written by: Joshua Marston
Cast: Guilied Lopez, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Patricia Rae, Orlando Tobon, John Alex Toro, Yenny Paola Vega
Screened at: Disney, NYC, 6/2/04
It's nice, especially nowadays, to hear America described as "perfect." You won't hear that too often among citizens who were born and who grew up here in the States, but in some parts of the world (no, not Western Europe or much of the Middle East), our streets are still paved with gold, our government saintly. "Perfect" is the way a character in "Maria Full of Grace" describes our country. In Joshua Marston's debut as director, using his own script which evolved through some improvisational work with the actors, you can understand why someone from Colombia would think as she does about the U.S. Colombia is known, unfortunately, as the source of much of the drug traffic in America, yet despite the great wealth amassed by the higher-ups in the drug trade, many Colombians are trying to make do with less than one dollar a day.
The title character, Maria (Catalina Sandino), for example, not only makes all too little money picking thorns from rose stems and boxing them for sale, but she has to ask permission of her foreman to go to the bathroom. And when she throws up on a bunch of roses after being refused said permission, her boss, instead of sympathizing, orders her to clean the flowers up. That's the last straw for her, and given that she's pregnant as well from a boy friend who offers unsuccessfully to marry her, she's had it with honest work and is steered toward a much riskier if far more lucrative job. Through contacts, she is hired as a mule, a person who swallows from 60 to 100 pellets of heroin or cocaine and, using a false passport and visa plus a round trip one-week ticket to New York, she is offered more money for a single trip than she could have earned in a year of plucking flowers.
"Maria, llena eres de gracia" as the film is known in its native Spanish (English subtitles, of course), takes us from Maria's unhappy job in a factory through her contact with the Colombian drug lord who explains the procedure, through her practicing her new trade by swallowing large grapes whole. She takes off with a few other young women, at least one of whom gets caught while another, after suffering the breakage of one of the latex gloves enveloping the drugs, dies and has her stomach cut open by the New Jersey motel contact.
"Maria" is filmed by Jim Denault in and around an Ecuadorian town south of Quito, with some lush photography showing up the mountainous beauty of that small country. The concluding segments take place in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, where Maria's lies get her set up in the home of the sister of one of these mules.
The picture holds some striking, deliberately underplayed performances from the lead, Ms. Sandino and a nice job by non- professional actor Yenny Paola Vega as her rotund friend Blanca–who is even more lost in New York than Maria and follows her around like a homeless Chihuahua.
What we come away with is an appreciation of life in the United States or, for that matter a distaste for a Third World country whose natural beauty belies its horrendous standard of living for perhaps a majority of the rural population.
Impressive though it may be, "Maria Full of Grace" cannot be considered in the same breath as the classic study of poverty- stricken Latin Americans who come to the U.S. for a better standard of living, Gregory Nava's monumental "El Norte"–a sweeping saga of a brother and sister who leave their violence- torn village in Guatemala to find a better life in The North. What it lacks in humor and complexity, however, is made up for in its authentic performances and the exposition to naive Americans like me of a culture of poverty and the desperate attempts by some people living therein to find a better way.
Rated R. 101 minutes. Copyright 2004 by Harvey Karten at
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