The Unseen Movie Review

Maria Full of Grace

Five years ago Steven Soderbergh brought the complexities of the international drug trade vividly to life in his astoundingly complex, documentary-style, Oscar-winning film Traffic. Whereas that movie featured multiple viewpoints, characters and storylines, Maria Full of Grace, despite dealing with the same central issues, features just one – that of an impoverished Columbian girl forced to become a drugs “mule”, trafficking heroin concealed in her stomach into the United States. What is lost of Soderbergh’s complexity is more than made up for by the sheer emotional connection this focus on one desperate and exploited individual helps bring about.

The lead actress, beautiful newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno, has rightly received both an Oscar nomination and several awards for her incredibly moving portrayal of the put-upon young mule Maria Alavrez. The combination of her delicate and utterly sympathetic portrayal and writer/director Joshua Marston’s sensitive filmmaking must rank as one of the most powerful cinematic offerings of recent years. The plight of those forced into the drug trade through lack of economic clout, education or opportunities for escape from poverty through other means has rarely been so perfectly displayed.

This is, unsurprisingly, a very serious film with a very serious message. Whereas Soderbergh’s Traffic expertly demonstrated how illegal drugs affect the lives of their users, the users’ families, and those officials charged with combating the trade, this film manages to humanise those who bear the brunt of the danger of actually trafficking the drugs themselves. Whereas certain sections of the popular press would label women such as Maria as being as guilty as the bosses of the cartels they work for in the spreading of the pernicious influence of hard drugs on western society, this film amply shows that when it comes to drugs, everyone is a victim bar those at the very top of the chain.

This is a film which hard drug users should be forced to watch for its ability to bring harshly to life the sheer horror of the process by which they get their hits. It should be watched by everyone else to give a sense of the human cost in those impoverished lands from which most of the world’s illegal drugs originate. It deserves a wide an audience as possible.

Yes, it is hard to watch at times. Yes, it is a “difficult” subject. No, it is not the sort of film many would go to see out of choice thanks to a combination of its lack of explosions or special effects and the fear that, due to having a message, it may be a bit preachy. It is indeed preachy, but the sermon it delivers is neither tedious nor untimely, and the film is simply so well made, and the performances so perfect, that even without its central point it is an incredible piece of cinema. This sort of film is very rare indeed, and as such cannot be recommended highly enough.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM