Frida

TIFF [2002]

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(USA, 2002)
Cast: Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Judd, Edward Norton
Written by: Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, Clancy Sigal, Anna Thomas
Directed by: Julie Taymor

If the short history of the movies has taught us anything, it’s that actors relish the opportunity to play painters--and the more tortured the art life, the better (you’ll never see “The Bob Ross Story” any time soon, well, maybe on the PAX Network…). We’ve seen Michelangelo in the unlikely form of Charlton Heston, Picasso interpreted by Anthony Hopkins, Francis Bacon via Derek Jacobi, and Van Gogh has been portrayed by such disparate thesps as Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth, and Martin Scorcese! Two years ago, Ed Harris unveiled his long-nurtured biopic of Jackson Pollack to the TIFF, shrieking, howling, and brooding to the folks in the back row throughout a shrill but passionate chronicle of the artist’s pitiful self-destruction.

This year, it’s Salma Hayek’s bid for similar cred as she headlines the life story of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. To her credit, Hayek managed to wrench this subject away from the dubious claws of both Madonna and Jennifer Lopez, and assumes the role convincingly. I was a bit disappointed to find that the innovative stage director Julie Taymor, who made her motion picture debut with the stunning revisionist Shakespeare epic “Titus”, reeled in her Greenawayesque visuals and was content to merely connect the essential dots of the artist’s life in standard ho-hum biopic fashion.

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But what a life: As a young girl, Kahlo’s artistic leanings were encouraged in a liberal household (“The Blue House”) in Mexico City. A trolley accident at age 18 leaves her spinal column broken, and sentences her to a life of risky operations, miscarriages, and amputations, the pain of which becomes the dominant motif throughout her body of work.

Her considerable talent wins her the tutorship of brilliant muralist and flagrant womanizer Diego Rivera (Molina), and their platonic relationship eventually becomes a combustible “open” marriage with free-spirited, bisexual Frida’s appetites surpassing her husband’s in terms of iconoclastic vision, fame, fortune, and needs of the flesh. Together, they take the ‘30s art world by storm: Rivera raises the ire of Nelson Rockefeller in NYC with a controversial mural (an incident previously documented in Tim Robbin’s “Cradle Will Rock”), Kahlo leaves him and becomes a living object d’art in Paris, and the two later reconcile to become the keepers of Leon Trotsky, and are suspected when the exiled Communist leader is assassinated.

At their first meeting, Rivera told Frida “you will paint until you die”, and he was right: Kahlo’s death comes at the age of 47, just after her first exhibition in her native Mexico. Her epitaph: “I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return”.

Obviously, Kahlo’s life was far from dull and neither is the film. Taymor keeps things moving briskly if a tad anonymously, indulging herself with the odd baroque montage (Day Of The Dead puppets perform Frida’s first operation, there’s a neat collage sequence when the couple first visit Manhattan, including a fantasy of Rivera as King Kong!) and CGI recreations of plot-relevant paintings. Unfortunately, the film is often bogged down with too many scenes of domestic squabbling, deadweight that has afflicted most so-called “real life” yarns from “JFK”, to ”Apollo 13”, to last year’s “A Beautiful Mind”.

Still, “Frida” suffices as a lively and well-acted account of a truly unique individual and seldom-covered artistic movement.

 

- Robert L

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