I am not a movie critic. I was very touched by this film, and, thus, had to examine it. Here are my minderings (“mind wanderings”). Please forgive any grand sweeping generalizations or idiosyncratic notions. This essay comes as is, with no guarantees. Be forewarned, some minor spoilers are included.
Frida Kahlo was a great artist who led a very tragic life, but who was able to create art from it. Julie Taymor’s movie, Frida, is a beautiful film that captures both the essence of Frida's life, in all its love and pain, and the translation of that life into her paintings. Salma Hayek does a good job playing Frida as a sensual woman who had so much to express and fought to do it despite being a cripple and being married to a larger-than-life cultural symbol and a great artist, Diego Rivera, while her painting went mostly unnoticed during her lifetime.
Frida was an interesting movie that was worth while renting, but there are a few aspects of it that prevent me from calling it a great movie. I think the writing was pretty good most of the time. There were some slow, long scenes, and the movie moved forward in fits and starts. It was very hard to track how much time had passed, and what year it was. There was a big hullabaloo about the communists and the fascists, Stalin and Hitler, when Trotsky (played lovingly by Geoffrey Rush) shows up. It was pretty cool to see a connection to Trotsky here. And then we heard no more about Hitler and Stalin, or World War II. I know that Mexico was very far away from Europe, but the characters were very involved with politics, if we are to believe the creators of this film. So, it seemed odd when all of this is dropped entirely from the last third of the movie. I was very impressed with Ashley Judd’s performance as a photographer and political activist. I didn’t recognize her at first: she was muscular and sexy and exotic. My impression of Judd in her other roles was more of a hometown girl.
SPOILER
Trotsky has an affair with Frida, which seemed very odd to me – I wonder if it is a fact, or just a rumor. Anyway, the paring was a little strange. I didn’t get so much fact as feeling from the film, which is OK, but you were distracted by facts that did unfold – the director could have chosen to show us less, but she didn’t. Film is a visual medium, and unless the visual is done in a very abstract way, the human eye feeds it to the brain, which takes it as fact. Oddly enough, this brings me to my favorite part of the film – the paintings and the images shown throughout the film, which are coming from Frida’s head, showing now she saw things. These images may not have been accurate (how would we know for sure except we have all those raw paintings), but it was intensely artsy and I loved it.
Another unfortunate thing: the mother was completely 2-dimensional. Although it was clear that she did not approve of Frida’s activities and interests, she loved her daughter, and we are left to assume so much because she was the quiet sufferer, and we did not see her very often. Her Dad was clearly the major influence in Frida’s life, but her mother was, too. For example, I would like to see more build up to the moment, after Frida’s bus accident, when both parents bring her a portable easel, which she can use in bed, and, thereby, acknowledge her as a painter, as what she is and loves. Her mother had a great distance to travel to get to this point, but we don’t get much of a hint of that. Her father was an artist himself, so this is a clear progression for him.
SPOILER
And finally, the movie held false promise for me: the opening scene showed Salma Hayek in heavy make-up—looking a little unreal, but I can forgive that – being carried in her bed through her exotic house to the back of a pick-up truck to attend her one-woman show in 1958. A close-up of her shows her looking up into a mirror that hangs from the canopy of the bed. She slowly smiles into that mirror as she watches herself. We later discover the significance of the mirror, but what about that smile? I was not fully satisfied that I understood the smile: not only why she smiled, but what was it about her as a person that would make her smile like that after living such a life? By the end of the movie, I should have known, but I didn’t. I think, perhaps, Salma could have given us a more penetrating performance, which would have aided in telling this aspect of the story. But I also feel that the director and writer (I was surprised that Edward Norton, who also appears in the film as Nelson Rockefeller, helped write the script) spent so much time squeezing in all that had happened during Frida’s life, that Frida’s character got a little lost.
But go rent it now. Go. Now.
Posted by ellen at October 31, 2003 10:20 AM