Overall Rating
  Awesome: 31.88%
Worth A Look: 65.22%
Just Average: 1.45%
Pretty Crappy: 0%
Sucks: 1.45%
5 reviews, 39 user ratings
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| Maria Full of Grace |
by Robert Flaxman
"Maria full of atmosphere."
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Self-conscious attempts to break with convention rarely work. If a film is working that hard at breaking with convention in some places, chances are good that the film as a whole doesn’t stray too far from the beaten path. Maria Full of Grace, the first film of writer/director Joshua Marston, takes steps to depict the realities of the Colombian drug trade from the point of view of a mule. While its events sometimes defy our expectations, and while it is effectively harrowing at many points, it still finds itself largely within the realm of convention. Fortunately, it survives this problem.Maria (first-timer Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a 17-year-old girl from a small Colombian town. She works a job she doesn’t like, is subject to a family that demands too much of her, gets pregnant by a boyfriend she doesn’t love, and dreams of a more interesting life. Thus when she is offered a job as a drug mule, swallowing dozens of balloons of heroin and transporting them to New York in her stomach, she doesn’t seem to have to think twice.
In his commentary on Maria’s DVD, Marston explains that he didn’t want Maria to be so desperate for work that she had no choice but to be a mule. He certainly made the right decision – what makes the film’s message so powerful and dramatic is that Maria is by no means forced into the trade. Instead, she likes the idea of both the money and the travel. This is one of several attempts by Marston to contradict his audience’s standard impression of the drug trade. Surely people working as mules only do so because they can’t do anything else! Not so, says Marston, and he’s done his research.
Despite Marston’s best intentions, though, the film mostly fails to crawl out of the shadow of predictability. Several important plot points are telegraphed by the passable but by no means superior dialogue, robbing the film of much of its tension at key moments. Perhaps a couple scenes feature events that are not what the audience expects to see, but the general story is nothing particularly inventive.
Fortunately, this is counterbalanced for much of the film by the atmosphere – Marston’s relatively spare direction and naturalistic camera (aided by cinematographer Jim Denault) give the proceedings a very harrowing and uncomfortable feel that puts the audience into the characters’ shoes. In particular, the scene on the plane is near-perfect at capturing the anxiety of Maria and her fellow mules, all also young Colombian women.
It is the overall effectiveness of the film’s atmosphere that makes Maria Full of Grace what it is. If the tone did not work, the film would sink itself. It becomes all too obvious at times that this is the first film for a lot of people involved, between the up-and-down acting (Moreno is a rock who deserved her Oscar nod, but much of her supporting cast is iffy at times) and the simplistic plot that is the hallmark of a film which is counting on its subject material to transcend the routine way the story is told.Luckily, the subject material does help the story a little, but it is mostly the strong execution of atmosphere and tone that moves the film slightly ahead of the crowd. With his first feature out of the way, Marston’s writing can only get better, and with this polished an ability to make the audience feel so early in his career, his future should be carefully watched.
link directly to this review at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8531&reviewer=385
originally posted: 03/16/05 17:22:11
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sydney Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sydney Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Seattle Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Seattle Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
16-Jul-2004
DVD: 07-Dec-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
24-Mar-2005 (M)
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