A review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Although it was adapted from Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography — Frida — Julie Taymor’s biopic on the life of Frida Kahlo flits from one chapter to the next so quickly that the audience only gets within arms’ length of Frida the artist or Frida the politically passionate hero. The film is most concerned with Frida the lover (Salma Hayek) and her tempestuous relationship with the legendary artist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). The result works best as a sort of Cliffs Notes version of a complex and fascinating life, complete with vivd, colorful illustrations. It’s not the in-depth portrait Kahlo deserves, but as “Intro to Frida”, it’s dazzling.
Taymor is not interested in the kind of realism that Ed Harris delivered in Pollock or the insightful psychological portrait Milos Foreman painted of Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus. Instead, she flirts with the bombast and operatic highs of a Broadway show. We get brief bursts of simplistic dialogue, vivid costume changes every five minutes, and a cast that dances about like a boisterous party of tipsy celebrities.
Still, there’s something to be said for a good party. Frida boasts a small galaxy of charismatic stars orbiting two appealing actors in the juiciest roles of their careers. Hayek and Molina have surprising chemistry. The best scenes in the film occur when they are alone, quiet, exchanging consolations and intimate questions. And no matter how trite their dialogue, the story they get to tell is remarkably compelling.
THE STORY
After getting a glimpse of Frida’s rebellious childhood, we then endure the crash that changed her life… in devastating slow-motion. The famously mono-browed painter endured most of her life in often excruciating pain, the result of a collision between the bus and an electric trolley car. Then come the treatments and side-effects of Frida’s fractured skeletal structure. Confined to a body cast for a long period, Frida begins sketching butterflies on her cast and, as if suddenly veering off the road prepared for her and tumbling down an embankment, she plunges into art.
Frida’s admiration for the local legend, artist, and political activist Diego Rivera leads her to seek his approval of her work. As Diego admires her paintings for the first time and offers a bland compliment, Kahlo shouts, “I want a critique! That’s not specific!”
Unfortunately, the movie isn’t very specific either. She and Diego fight, make up, fight make up, have lustful affairs and experimental flings. Kaho indulges in both sexes, since her prime motivation is to provoke her husband. Her recklessness is driven mroe by loneliness than lust. But eventually, Diego’s impropriety reaches appalling depths, and Kahlo breaks free from him entirely, unable to face where their moral anarchy has led them.
This sets up the story’s truly moving and rewarding finale-a surprisingly sincere reconciliation. It’s a grace note lacking in most stories of infidelity. Somehow, these two paragons of promiscuity managed to wrap up their lives in tenderness, together in love and a sort of exhaustion until her death in 1954, at 47 years old. It becomes a story not of independence, but of human weakness.
THE DIRECTOR
What a ride. Taymor jerks us from highs to lows so fast that pretty soon the thrill of the yo-yo goes away, and we merely hang on. Even though most viewers will become emotionally disengaged halfway through the film, there is still plenty of reasons to keep watching. This is the movies, and visual splendor is half the reason we’re here. I defend George Lucas’s new Star Wars trilogy for giving us what few other movies do… a completely engrossing visual experience that justify why we’re at the movies instead of reading the same story in a book. Similarly, Taymor plunges us into the colors and contours of Kahlo’s world. The screen is so packed with glittering detail that it would seem more appropriate for a film on the artistry of Klimt than Kahlo. She gives us an experience that a detailed, deep-digging biography cannot.
She also gives us keen insight into Kahlo’s paintings by filling the screen with examples of her work. Sometimes we come upon them abruptly, and when we realize that we are looking at a real Frida Kahlo work, the painting begins to move. Elements come alive. Frida blinks her eyes. And the movie begins again. It’s a marvelous effect.
Taymor’s not afraid of nudity, either, and this story calls for a good deal of it. How else could you tell a story of a painter who not only painted nudes, but indulged in them afterwards? To her credit, Taymor avoids excessive, pornographic indulgence; the imagery is not used to arouse the audience, but to reveal the puppy-eyed Diego’s tactics, and then his ridiculous denials of responsibility afterward. Those who shed their clothes too easily for each other clearly pay the price for it.
The director’s only stylistic misstep is the occasional jump into the surreal. Some of her humorous collage-sequences woek, but others are just weird. During Kahlo’s bouts of pain, we are treated to bizarre visions of skeletons with surgical instruments toying with her body. These puppets are startling and creepy indeed, but they give us the unfortunate sense that Taymor’s bus has been run over by Tim Burton’s trolley car.
Taymor earned her reputation for outrageous visual displays with her Broadway stage version of The Lion King. Then she gave Shakespeare’s Titus a big screen treatment that was a sensory overload of paint, gore, and operatic melodrama. Titus was a set designer’s dream… or nightmare, depending on who you talk to. I was expecting eyefuls from Frida, and I definitely got them, but I was surprised at Taymor’s restraint. She lets the actors and their boisterous performances dominate the film.
THE ACTORS
Taymor’s hit-and-miss contributions are no more or less successful than Hayek’s. Salma Hayek may have too childlike a demeanor to convince us of Kahlo’s complexity, but she looks enough like her to convince us that she’s the same woman we see in the paintings, which are prominently displayed throughout the film. She’s surprisingly small when standing next to Molina’s giant, bear-like form, and yet she holds our attention with dark eyes and a feisty grin. Who knows if Kahlo was this wickedly mischievous? But Hayek is a joy to watch. You half-expect her to burst into song at any moment. With just one flight of fancy, she could whip this community into a number worthy of Moulin Rouge.
The more demanding emotional scenes, however, reveal Hayek’s limitations. To take us further into Kahlo’s interior life, Hayek turns the volume up instead of down. She thinks intense melodrama will make us feel for the character. But the movie is already turned up to “11″. What we need is quiet, some slower scenes, some moments of silence, of reflection, to show us Frida as she is when the spotlight is off of her. Maybe Hayek should have watched Juliette Binoche in Blue.
Still, I’m extremely grateful Hayek got to bring Frida to the screen instead of Madonna or Jennifer Lopez.
Alfred Molina nearly steals the show right out from under his co-star. He’s a lumbering bear of an actor who can somehow make us care about Rivera, a talented, promiscuous, egotistical, at times reprehensible human being. It’s hard to believe this marvelous giant was once the wide-eyed fool who tried to steal an idol from Indiana Jones.
I’m less impressed with the film’s parade of distracting celebrity cameos. There’s Antonio Banderas, and you half expect him to bring out the guitar-case and the shotgun. There’s Edward Norton, doing nothing more than showing his face, as bland as he was in Red Dragon. There’s Ashley Judd with a spectaculrly strange accent. And there’s Geoffrey Rush as Trotzky, in a performance that is more caricature than re-creation.
It’s the lesser-known supporting cast that give this community realism and backbone. Mia Maestro as Kahlo’s sister, Patricia Reyes Spindola as her mother, and Roger Rees as her father are the only quiet characters in the film. Thus, they stand out. You can feel the potential for a great performance from Rees-who commands our attention in all of his fleeting scenes-but the movie keeps interrupting him.
These actors have to settle for soap-opera dialogue that only tells us things already obvious from the action. “Diego does not belong to anyone.” “You were never my husband.” “Is fidelity important to you?” “Loyalty is important to me.” “Diego, you arouse passions…” The writers venture ankle-deep into the political waters in which Kahlo and Rivera swam. Like A Beautiful Mind, Frida makes its hero more attractive by avoiding the more discomforting aspects of the character. Kahlo’s enthusiasm for Stalin-style communism is muted. Each occasional outburst of shallow political speechifying is quickly followed by a distracting, lush visual spectacle.
A STORY OF MARRIAGE, NOT POLITICS
It is interesting that this story of political revolutionaries and sexual adventurers would, in the end, become a powerful great testament to the rewards of faithfulness and the meaningfulness of a good marriage. For these lovers, marriage seemed an impossibility, just another sacred institution to disgrace by rebellion. Yet, you can tell that the farther they stray from their vows and their love, the more unhappy they become. Kahlo’s anarchic, self-interested friends view marriage as “a hostile political act”, but they admit that individuals who willingly, whole-heartedly, exclusively commit themselves to each other are doing something “radical, courageous, and very romantic.”
We can glimpse the reason Frida values faithfulness if we look to her parents. She clearly marvels at her parents’ faithfulness to each other through hardship and disharmony. Their quiet, steadfast, unconditional love for each other and for her, even at her lowest points, must have been a beacon in the darkness. After the film, I am haunted by their inconspicuous yet powerful presence in this film.
“What makes a good marriage?” she asks her father. “A short memory,” he quips. It’s a joke, but it points to the truth. Forgiveness, long-suffering, bearing with each others’ weaknesses… these are the behaviors Christ exhorted his followers to exhibit to each other. It is the Way. Even the lives of those who run from his teachings end up proving him right about this in the end.
When Kahlo catches Rivera in an infidelity, he argues, “It meant nothing. I’ve given more affection in a handshake.” Telling lies like that just sets you up for embarrassment. The tragedy of Kahlo and Rivera is that they reinforce God’s truths by breaking all the rules, making themselves miserable, and showing the rules to be good. The “payoff” of this story, however Hollywood-ized, is that they learned lessons and reached out in reconciliation, forgiveness, and some measure of healing before their tempestuous time together was over.
“This corpse is still breathing,” says Frida Kahlo in her last days. Her damaged body, her artistic accounts of suffering, and the scarred wreckage of her marriage are indeed still very much alive, speaking the truth.