Review of Frida (2002) by Kenneth L — 13 Aug 2011

This is a well-above-average biographical film about the busy life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and while it has a lot of strengths, I did find I wanted it to do even more. It tells you an awful lot about Frida's life, but I think decidedly less about her art per se and how it was affected by her life.

Salma Hayek, who was nominated for an Oscar, does give a great performance. She has to play Frida over the course of about 30 years, and is almost as convincing as a 17-year-old schoolgirl as she is as a 30-something artist in her prime and the sick and dying 47-year-old Frida. This is partially due to the Oscar-winning makeup, but also due to how Hayek plays Frida with varying levels of energy and innocence. Alfred Molina, a really under-appreciated actor, is very good as Diego Rivera. He's played a remarkable variety of nationalities - American (Spider-man 2), French (Chocolat), English (An Education, and he actually is English), and Mexican here, and he's always thoroughly convincing in whatever role he plays. Geoffrey Rush disappears into a fairly brief appearance as Leon Trotsky, and Edward Norton (who apparently wrote the final version of the script) has a brief but funny part as John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Visually, the film is usually pretty and sometimes incredibly good-looking. I really loved the occasional shots where a figure from a Kahlo painting would subtly transform into a real actor, or vice versa. There's a brilliant sequence parodying the original 1933 King Kong when Frida and Diego go to New York. The cinematography is bright and colorful, sometimes playing on the types of colors Kahlo used in her paintings. The wonderful visual sensibilities that director Julie Taymor brought to Titus and Across the Universe are present here, though significantly toned down to make the film more realistic. The Mexican-guitar-heavy Oscar-winning musical score is pretty great too.

I guess what I felt was missing from the movie was a really concrete sense of the connection between Frida's life and her paintings. There are a few moments where the movie does this brilliantly, as when we see her painting herself in a painful-looking metal brace while actually wearing that metal brace. But, particularly in the middle of the movie, this sort of thing wasn't explored enough for me. Still, though, this is a well-acted and well-made movie that efficiently tells you the basic life-story of Frida Kahlo.