Frida | Review

Taymor gives us a satisfactory look at an artist’s colorful life.

If there is one subject in filmmaking that always seems to have trouble it’s the biopic, especially when it concerns portraying the life of a famous artist. The problem with these types of film matters is that film never seems to encapsulate the true spirit or the persona of the artist especially when the film features the re-fabrication of artist’s creative process within the context of demonstrating actual samples of their works. Director Julie Taymor uses her theatre-background as her palette for her take on the famous revolutionary Mexican painter with a unibrow. After receiving quite the box-office thrashing with her beautiful dud of Titus, Taymor returns from the ashes with ‘Frida’ which gets a more simplified treatment-letting the actors’ performances push the picture into higher ground.

With a persona that resembles a matador-Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek-Timecode) literally bull fights her way through life. With the addition of her mental anguishes-from a result of her career as an artist and as a consequence of her relationship to the great painter and passionate womanizer of a Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina-Magnolia) and her physical disability followed by operations a plenty-the Latin comes out in the character’s personality. The film takes us from the oddly funny journey from her first art exhibition intro to a flashback moment of her first encounter with the Mexican muralist Diego, and her life-altering traffic accident that left her in many body casts and other body contraptions. The portrait of youth is quickly replaced for the narrative’s more titillating parts of their “loyal” and by the line union that sees them in the full scope of their very unique relationship that saw them as partners in life and as artists. Part biography and part bibliography the film contains many of her works of art and is littered with the sequential appearances of historical encounters with big names in the world of art and politics with photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd-High Crimes), muralist David Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas-Femme Fatale), Nelson Rockefeller (Edward Norton-Red Dragon) and a Geoffrey Rush-(Lantana) as Leon Trotsky.

For the most part, Taymor captures the dynamics of and the force behind their relationship from Frida’s perspective-which happens to be Hayek’s best performance to date-but even with her heavy accent (finally used to her advantage) and her often exposed curvaceous body, Hayek still seems to be playing a character rather than being ‘in’ character in sharp contrast to the performance from Molina who authenticates Diego’s personality and probably even looked just right for the part. Their combined passion for one another and for their art are satisfactorily portrayed, the use of animated special effects also brings a neat touch to the film-the Empire State Building/King Kong sequence be reminiscent of the music video for Tears for Fears’ Sowing the Seeds of Love and the nice colors and imagery from Frida’s canvases are beautifully brought to life with the same animated snippets.

The film is also captured in the true red, white and green of Mexico with the food flavors and gentle acoustic licks from the guitar. It took quite a while for Hayek to bring to the screen to the big screen, initially in development hell; it finally saw the light thanks to some help of her star friends. Going into this film and not knowing a damn thing about the artist-I was under the impression that Taymor gives the viewer an honest portrait of the artist and vehicles an honest biopic here-an interesting film, mildly entertaining with a nice play on the visuals.

Rating 3 stars