Review: Frida (2002)
Dennis Schwartz
Herrera/Clancy Sigal/Diane Lake/Gregory Nava/Anna Thomas/Ms. Herrera;
cinematographer: Rodrigo Prieto; editor: Francoise Bonnot; music: Elliot
Goldenthal; cast: Salma Hayek (Frida Kahlo), Alfred Molina (Diego Rivera),
Ashley Judd (Tina Modott), Geoffrey Rush (Leon Trotsky), Antonio Banderas (David
Alfaro Siqueiros), Edward Norton (Nelson Rockefeller). Roger Rees (Frida's
Father), Patricia Reyes Spíndola (Frida's Mother), Saffron Burrows (Gracie),
Valeria Golino (Lupe Marin), Mia Maestro (Cristina Kahlo), Diego Luna
(Alejandro, Frida's first boyfriend); Runtime: 127; MPAA Rating: R; producers:
Sarah Green/Salma Hayek/Jay Polstein/Lizz Speed/ Nancy Hardin/Lindsay
Flickinger/Roberto Sneider; Miramax Films; 2002)
"... its many small grand artistic touches introduced throughout can't
compensate for the libertine spirit that's missing in telling Frida's story."
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A flat biopic with the saving graces of some fanciful photographic touches
provided by the great cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto that keep it mildly alive.
"Frida" got the artist's flamboyance and splash just about right but could never
get to the inner pain that made the artist paint from her experience and
suffering. Director Julie Taymor ("Titus"and the Broadway play "The Lion King")
who is noted mostly as being a theater and puppet artist, and the many
screenwriters including the author of Frida Kahlo's biography, Hayden Herrera,
and Ms. Hayek's boyfriend Edward Norton, who is not credited but who put the
finishing touches on the script when he wasn't performing as Nelson Rockefeller,
could never come up with an adequate script to give their artist subject the
pulsating presentation she deserved. They could never show and tell how the
humanistic artist could still admire Stalin's brand of brutality and communism
(which she did even though the film tries to smooth that over by never saying an
ill word about its untouchable heroine), and it also failed to show how her work
captured the universal loneliness and pain she was suffering from. All the film
seems willing to go to the mat for, is to tick off a laundry list off the
artist's lifetime accomplishments and why the filmmaker deems her to be a great
artist and a role model for Mexican women. These are shabby aims when an
in-depth character study of Frida has much more than that to be mined. "Frida"
results in a safe, old-fashioned Hollywood-like biopic about an artist who
endured great physical pain all her life and who was a shut-in and an adventurer
and a fiercely independent personality. Frida is paraded before us as an avowed
Communist born to a German Jewish father and a conservative Catholic Mexican
mother; a feminist and an outsider; a bisexual (affairs with Josephine Baker and
Gracie, a New York sophisticate Diego also took to bed; as someone who was
promiscuous and had an affair with Leon Trotsky and mingled with other famous
people yet led a lonely life; someone stuck in a stormy marriage to the
womanizing artist twenty one years her senior, Diego Rivera; and, someone who
always lived close to the edge. The film could have done much better then get
her cosmetic look almost right while honing in on her need to wear Mexican
peasant dresses to cover up her many physical scars (Frida was very hairy and
was noted for the wild look her unmanageable eyebrows gave her, facts which the
filmmaker almost completely ignored). The beautiful, diminutive Mexican actress
Salma Hayek who plays Frida and had a lifelong ambition to play that role,
co-produced the film with a host of others and thereby beat out other actresses
such as Madonna and J.Lo who also wanted the part. Ms. Hayek never quite
embarrasses herself but her performance never gets to the heart of the artist or
gives her soul.
This biopic about such an unconventional subject who died nearly half a century
ago and has been revived by Ms. Herrara's book and raised to icon status
including first-name celebrity recognition, called for a script that wasn't as
straightforward as this one. It needed one that could exploit the passions of
such an animated painter and to bring about a feeling of real movement and
adventure and struggle for a woman who was dying all her life but goes all out
to live a full life. The film didn't do this, as it failed to get to the real
person and spent all its time on surface material and marriage spats that looked
like artificial acting devices even though the actors had a good screen
chemistry together. It came up with only hints of how exciting her passion for
art was, as it opted to waste time by shooting so many unnecessary scenes of her
meeting celebs by accident and by too many close-ups of her and her famous
gargantuan-sized artist husband Diego Rivera as played by Alfred Molina. His
mugging for the camera stole whatever acting honors there are for such a failed
film, as in all honesty he was so overwhelming that the film could have just as
easily been titled "Diego." But what ultimately brings the film down, is the
prosaic dialogue. One example is when Frida tells Diego after not seeing him for
some time: "You lost weight." He responds: "And, you lost your toes." This comes
after she lost her toes when gangrene set in. The dialogue throughout was just
as turgid and meaningless.
What did work and showed the potential the film had if it could get away from
the conventional treatment of its subject, was the extraneous artistic shots of
Frida's paintings brought to life in a surreal manner ala MTV filming
techniques. Also, to Ms. Taymor's credit, she intelligently provides at times
inspired touches such as - stop motion action shots, color tinting in brightly
exotic desert shades, finely textured black-and-white sequences, shots of Diego
in New York to do the Rockefeller commissioned mural against a lively Dadaist
collage of the New York setting, Frida's dream of her hubby as King Kong, a
puppet show in the hospital (with the help of the gifted Quay brothers
animations of skeletons in the post-accident emergency room--the skeletons were
copied from one of Frida's paintings). But by bringing in a host of cameo
performances, all with silly foreign accents (Ashley Judd as a photographer
sporting a Russian accent as if she's from Kentucky and the Australian actor
Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky, who is never able to overcome sounding more Australian
than Russian), it took away from the film's energy and left it stuck in the
usual banality reserved for such biopics. It's a shame to think what could have
been accomplished in better hands than these controlling sensibilities exhibited
by the not-ready-for-prime time filmmaker Ms. Taymor and the ever-present
authority figure Ms. Hayek. After all, it's amazing to comprehend what Frida has
gone through in her over 30 surgical operations endured from age 18-when her
torso was flattened and impaled in a Mexico City trolley accident-until her
death at 47. She deserved more gravitas and more of a look at her delicate
nature and at the fierceness she managed in her surreal art than this barely
adequate but too mild telling of her life could muster.
The film's most impressionable scene was the accident when the electric trolley
was hit by a bus, leaving Frida in pain covered with gold dust and the metal
handrail that pierced her pelvis and passed through her vagina. She was hurt so
badly doctors did not think she would ever walk again, and she was also never
able to bear children.
It's most unfortunate that the film could never get at the artist Frida was and
the tremendous will power she had to live such a full life despite her
hardships. That's where the film really disappoints and its many small grand
artistic touches introduced throughout can't compensate for the libertine spirit
that's missing in telling Frida's story. It's the story of a genius artist who
is engulfed in a lifetime pool of blood and tears that gives her the foundation
for her art to flourish, but here Frida is played by a proud actress ill
prepared to get into such depths and who only sees Frida from the selfish
standpoint of getting a juicy role.
REVIEWED ON 12/14/2002 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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Karina Montgomery
Matinee
A biopic of an intense visual artist like Frida Kahlo could only be
directed by a woman such as Julie Taymor, whose prior stage & screen
work is so visual as to be iconic. Taymor shoots scenes rich with
color and shadow, and she also segues brilliantly through some Kahlo
paintings and bizarre but folksy animations. These portray what
would in a conventional movie be conveyed through montage, but
instead create a living painting out of the silver screen and add to
the idea of Frida as one whose work is exclusively autobiographical.
Personally, I was ignorant of Kahlo's life history, and had only seen
her colorful, angry looking paintings. Her story in this film is
fascinating, from her innocent 1922 teenage years, her crippling 1925
accident, to her death in 1954. It is a story of how she came to be
known, how her paintings content came to be, and her life with Diego
Rivera. It is a love story as bizarre and personal as her paintings.
The cast is sprinkled with pretty-big-name actors like Antonio
Banderas, Ashley Judd, Ed Norton, and we cannot guess their future
role in Frida's life, as they are famous faces who surely must get a
lot of screen time. No matter what, the star of this film is Salma
Hayek. Hayek is radiantly, fiercely beautiful despite Frida's
signature chevron eyebrow, and you forget that she is anyone but
Frida Kahlo as you watch her every move. Hayek fought for this
project to be made, and it is clear that she is very passionate about
her fellow countrywoman and her story being told. Hayek and Kahlo
were both tiny, childlike spitfires, sensual and confident. Salma
embodies Frida, and brings life to the surreal self portraits we see
trapped in cheap tin frames. Trapped for so much of her life in beds
or wheelchairs, when she can stand, she is dancing.
Frida spent most of her later life with Diego Rivera, famous
communist, muralist, and polygamist, played with unapologetic gusto
by Alfred Molina. Rivera and his work are always huge, epic,
political, but only are personal as far as recording the images of
his models and lovers. He is a selfish man who pretends to think of
The People first but will not sacrifice any of his own ego toward
betterment of all. Frida paints almost exclusively herself, yet she
is generous, open, loving, and embodies the ideals that Rivera
strives to express. When she paints her pain, it is her only real
complaint. Frida has been quoted as saying, "I paint self-portraits
because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."
It's a little long, but it is a small price to learn about such an
interesting woman.
--
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These reviews (c) 2002 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward
but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks.
rev...@cinerina.com
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