Morally detached
Mark Steyn
Maria Full of Grace 15, selected cinemas The publicity poster for Maria Full of Grace shows the face of the eponymous Maria looking up at a hand that’s proffering her mouth a vaguely Communion-like pellet. The sacramental imagery, plus the movie title, plus the character’s name, plus the fact that she’s carrying an unborn baby, and that she works at a rose plantation removing thorns, may lead the casual movie-goer to assume he’s in for a religious allegory.
This Maria, from some nowhere burg up country in Colombia, is pregnant by her noaccount loser boyfriend and the sacramental pellet she’s about to receive is, in fact, a baggie of heroin. She’s set to swallow 70 of them and get on a plane to New York: she’s a courier, or ‘mule’, as they’re known in the trade. Hail Mary, full of drugs.
Maria Alvarez is played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, the sort of bright-eyed natural teen beauty every gritty indie sliceof-life needs. You’re portraying grinding poverty with dodgy fast-tracks to seedy underworlds — the more typical Colombian country gal in the midst of all that might start off with a more pronounced moustache and wind up quickly with the dead-eyed, pock-marked, hardened-beyond-her-years look of so many bit-players in the drug business. So, if you’re trying to communicate the idea of spiritual goodness at the heart of a sordid world, the luminous Miss Moreno is just perfect. She made quite a splash at all the hip film festivals, and she deserves the career bump she got, because she’s about 85 per cent of the movie.
Joshua Marston, a first-time film-maker, American but directing in Spanish, introduces us to Maria shinning up to the roof of some shack in her village and calling down to the boyfriend to join her. He can’t be bothered. He quite fancies a shag, but not if it involves the effort of climbing up the wall: it’s that kind of relationship. When she reveals she’s carrying their baby, he responds, ‘You’re not fucking with me, are you?’ He dutifully if sullenly offers to marry her. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he says, meaning it in the loyally supportive sense but also pithily summing up his prospects. They bicker in a desultory fashion about whether she’d move into his parents’ small house — there’s a dozen in the family, and he shares a room with his brother — or whether he’d move into her mother’s — which would cast aspersions on his machismo. But neither means it. There’s no pretence by either that this child was conceived in love.
Maria wants a better life, better than poverty wages at the rose plantation all day and back to her slack-jawed yokel at night. At a local dance, she meets a fellow from Bogota with the glamorous Yanquified name of Franklin. He knows of a high-paying position that’s just opened up. ‘It’s a really cool job,’ he says. And, with little or no thought, she agrees to become a drugs mule. Seeing her squatting in the bathtub of a New Jersey motel room, attempting to defecate her stomach’s valuable cargo for the impatient dealers in the bedroom, I can’t say it looked that cool a job. But, for a Colombian 17-year-old, it’s certainly lucrative — and in Marston’s morally detached presentation we’re invited to see it as a rational choice for someone seeking a way out of a life of exploitation for peanuts.
Maria and her friends make it past US Customs at Newark. But, alas, as is the way in the narcotics industry, things go awry, and with violent results. And at this point Maria gets to show what she’s made of. Presented with a set of tough challenges, she does the right thing, more or less, but that doesn’t exactly justify the title and the film could more plausibly have been called Maria, Full of Spunk. She’s a feisty, determined, likable kid, but the religious allegory thing never quite lifts off. The Sixties auteurs who started the mini-genre of finding sacred metaphors among the contemporary world’s scuzzy and downtrodden were for the most part conventionally raised Catholics working off the burthens of their childhoods. Marston, by contrast, appears to have no real feeling for the spiritual, but is just seeking a little hightoned gloss for a sweet fable.
Indeed, disinclined to raise Maria’s eyes to the Lord or to any beatific vision, the film seeks salvation, intentionally or not, in the American dream: it’s New York with all its possibilities that gives the young girl the opportunity to escape both dead-end rural life and the drug cartel. I must be the most stridently pro-Yank film critic in the British press, but for once I found myself slightly affronted by the way the film accepts America as the land of plenty without troubling to ponder the fact that it’s also the major consumer of the grisly products peddled by Maria and her compatriots.
Oh, well. She’s got a lovely face. And the film has some unusual touches, like getting the role of the New York Colombian immigrants’ help-centre guy played by a real-life Colombian immigrants’ help-centre guy, Orlando Tobin. And Marston’s portrayal of the heroin smugglers as bored schlubs is a lot more plausible than most drug movies.
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