FRIDA (2002) *** I think much of the idea was to give Salma Hayek an opportunity to demonstrate that she's not only beautiful, but exceptionally talented. She demonstrates both. A biopic of crippled and tormented artist Frida Kahlo might seem like an unlikely stage, but instead it's a perfect one. I don't know much more about Frida than what my wife has told me, but Salma's portrayal is dark and deep and nuanced and awkward in that provocative manner of ambivalent angels. Since we know Salma's naturally very graceful, there is clearly some acting involved. I like Frida's art, its mixture of unrestrained emotional passions and a wry metaphysical cynicism, and the most amazing and important thing is that Salma gives you an onscreen character who could have-would have had to-given birth to such redemptive madness. It doesn't hurt that everyone around her is playing in the red zone, too: Alfred Molina's rendering of Diego Rivera is a portrait of what happens when the angel in us is too compliant with the animal, and it's unlikely that you'll ever see a more sensitive portrayal of Leon Trotsky than that offered by Geoffrey Rush. Also tremendous, brilliant but too brief, turns by Ashley Judd and Antonio Banderas. What is it with sympathetic films about communists, made by people who aren't communists, anyway? I believe that it's because communism represents the last adrenaline rush of pure idealism on the body politic, for a long time and maybe forever. The wild and naïve hope before it turned so bad that it became a totalitarian inversion of itself (point nicely made here by Trotsky about Stalin). But for a time it was possible, admirable, to believe so many good things about the possibilities of your fellow man. At least, as depicted, it gave rise to some very good parties. Julie Taymore's presentation is as polar as everything around it: at one extreme she lets the actors lap up every drop of attention, like artists at an opening. At the other she swamps the entire thing with multi-media contortions in some neo-surrealist obscurantist vein. Both work brilliantly. In fact, on several occasions I found myself wishing that the entire thing had been done in the surrealist manner, only to return to earth realizing that then I'd miss out on the greatest element of the film, the acting. Maybe Julie can do a sister surrealist film, now that the uninitiated (me) know the points of reference.
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