Movie Review - Maria Full of Grace (2004)

[johnkarls]

NY Times FILM REVIEW
A Mule's Long Trek in Search Of the North American Dream

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: July 16, 2004

It's painfully understandable that the 17-year-old title character of ''Maria Full of Grace'' would risk her freedom and even her life to be a drug mule. This gripping Colombian film, written and directed by Joshua Marston, follows the desperate plunge of Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) from a dead-end job as an assembly-line worker in a Colombian flower factory into the drug-smuggling underworld.

This treacherous territory, where young women, seduced by suave, sweet-talking recruiters, can earn large sums by smuggling heroin into the United States, is Maria's last resort when she finds herself unemployed and pregnant. Her ruthless new bosses make her former taskmasters look like angels.

Before the story zeroes in on the harrowing details of drug running and its dangers, it depicts Maria's hopelessly circumscribed life in the rural village where she lives with her mother, grandmother and sister. She is expected to turn over to the family the minuscule salary she earns dethorning roses in a sweatshop atmosphere.

Hounded by her boss to be more productive, she impulsively quits. Even when her family panics, she refuses to grovel to get her job back. She also becomes pregnant by her deadbeat boyfriend, Juan (Wilson Guerrero), who reluctantly offers to marry her. Because she doesn't love him, she turns down the proposal.

The movie, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, portrays Maria's story as a variation of the predicament that draws thousands of young Colombian women into the drug trade. Courted by Franklin (Jhon Alex Toro), a charming, motorcycle-riding recruiter she meets in a club, she is introduced to his ominously soothing boss, Javier (Jaime Osorio Gómez), who lays out the rules and invites her to try out for the role of illicit courier.

If Maria's story is a template for countless others like it, what keeps your heart in your throat during the movie is Maria herself. In a performance that feels lived in rather than acted, Ms. Moreno's Maria is an attractive, smart, spirited young woman who faces the challenge of fending for herself with a fierce determination and an ingenuity that compromises but never undermines her essential decency and morality.

Any hope of success as a smuggler requires that Maria lie with a straight face under extreme stress. Before flying to New York with trumped-up papers and cash, she trains for the job in practice sessions by swallowing large grapes that are the same size as the drug-filled pellets she'll carry in her stomach. Once she has mastered the technique, she gulps 62 pellets, along with medicine that slows the digestive system. If a single pellet breaks inside her, she's told, she will die of an overdose. And if she excretes any pellets before arriving on New York, she must immediately clean and re-ingest them.

Maria's journey from Bogotá to New York in a plane with three other smugglers is one of the tensest flights ever filmed. Upon her arrival she is pulled aside, interrogated and threatened with being X-rayed. Only her pregnancy prevents her from being internally examined and arrested.

In the film's ugliest scenes, Maria and two other women are roughly hustled into a car by thugs and driven to a sleazy New Jersey hotel, where they're dosed with laxatives and held prisoner. If one pellet breaks or is found missing, death is certain. If she escapes, she is warned, deadly reprisals will be taken against her family. Among the three other smugglers on the flight, one is incarcerated at the airport, while Maria's clinging best friend, Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), who signed on to the program, and Lucy (Guilied López), an experienced smuggler with relatives in Queens, make it as far as New Jersey.

But the unpredictable story, which involves several cruel surprises, doesn't end there. Maria winds up in Queens, temporarily sheltered by Lucy's pregnant sister, Carla (Patricia Rae), and her husband in their tiny, overcrowded apartment. The movie offers a pungent and sympathetic look at the closely knit Colombian immigrant community, whose neighborhood leader, Don Fernando (Orlando Tobón), is a middleman among the immigrants, the drug lords and the sympathetic employers who help new arrivals get a foothold in the United States.