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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 50.91%
Worth A Look: 18.18%
Average: 16.36%
Pretty Bad: 14.55%
Total Crap: 0%
3 reviews, 37 user ratings
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| Frida |
by Erik Childress
"Show Me The Art!"
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Call me uncultured, call me ill-informed, but when it comes to the art world, I’m mostly at a loss. It’s not that I can’t appreciate a beautiful painting or don’t know my way around a few choice artists, but when it comes to background info or seeking out new innovators, I’m not the Renaissance Man I aspire to be. That’s why I love the pictures that move. They can be informative, beautiful and challenging in the same way (if not, more so) that the coffee house/living poet’s society deem worthy of the colorful, still images. Julie Taymor’s Frida is certainly beautiful to look at, but its not very informative about its titular character and no more challenging than your average television biopic.Salma Hayek (in a fine, but not quite Oscar-worthy performance) plays painter Frida Kahlo and that’s applying a loose label considering one thing in the film we rarely see is her actually painting. As we first meet her, its obvious that her personality does not lend to conformity (she dresses like a man for a family portrait) which only further endears her to loving father, Guillermo (Roger Rees). One day, Frida finds herself in the middle of a horrific trolley accident (filmed in stylish, almost beautiful fashion) that is the beginning of a life of consistent pain. Her first drawing of a butterfly for her exeunt lover unsubtly parallels her full body cast cocoon.
As she emerges and is able to walk again, she begins a relationship with hulking painter and revolutionary, Diego Rivera (a terrific Alfred Molina). Their lifelong alliance consists of the womanizing Rivera making Frida aware of his love for the flesh as well as the paint, having her accept his indiscretions (like most famous biopic stories) yet still seeing her succumbing to the natural anger and jealousy when his nude paintings become a reality. So prevalant are Rivera’s actions (a good portion deals with his infamous Rockefeller mural) that the film just as well could have been called “Diego”.
Frida’s story does come to life though whenever we get a glance at her finished work. Usually viewed as an afterthought of Frida dealing with her troubled marriage or her grueling bodyaches (which we never get a true sense of), her art does come off as a representation of her life. Presented all the more striking because Taymor makes the work breathe in montages as the colors find a surrealistic movement that isn’t quite animation and not quite reality. Whatever clashes Taymor may have had with the Miramax Weinstein Bros. in bringing this to the screen, its only in these moments that the beauty of Frida’s work give us an insight to both the woman and the artist.
A filmmaker as ambitious as Taymor (who brought us the incredible anachronistic magnificence of Shakespeare’s Titus and the stage production of The Lion King) should have seen this as the real story instead of just touching (up)on every significant event in her life and brushing it over like a footnote. (A long affair with Russian writer, Leon Trotsky, is treated like a one-night stand.) Frida’s strokes with lesbianism come and go, but we never get inside her mind which, at times, came off as twisted as the bones she struggled with time and time again.“Don’t give me one of your speeches about the artist and the people,” comes from the mouth of one of the characters and it’s the most telling statement about the film. If ever there was a time to show and not tell, its in the portrait of an artiste. Focusing on an artform that depends on both our eyes and our viewpoint, there’s no point in telling the same ‘ol story especially on a figure that many may be unfamiliar with. Michael Mann missed his opportunity last year with Ali (on an icon that EVERYONE knows) and now Taymor plays it safe on an artisan whose work could have opened up the eyes of new viewers instead of distracting them with a barrage of celebrity cameos (and Hayek nudity) that shift the focus away from the name on the marquee we came to check out. With so many from Antonio Banderas to Edward Norton to Ashley Judd all pitching in and obviously cutting their salaries to help tell what they must believed was an important and interesting story to have on record, it’s sad the filmmakers couldn’t recognize the aspect that was the most fascinating. The art.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6258&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/25/02 06:01:09
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
25-Oct-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2002
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