OVP: Frida (2002)

Film: Frida (2002)

Stars: Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Mia Maestro, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Diego Luna

Director: Julie Taymor

Oscar History: 6 nominations/2 wins (Best Actress-Salma Hayek, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup*, Original Score*, Original Song-"Burn It Blue")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In celebration of my brother's birthday today, we are doing not one Best Actress (his favorite category) review, but two!  This morning we talked about Greta Garbo's legendary turn in Camille, but this afternoon we're going to go with a more modern take.  My brother has seen pretty much every nominee for Best Actress since 1960, and his approach to the category has been reverse chronology, so I'm going to honor his strategy by picking the most recent film that I have not seen cited for the Best Actress field, which would be Frida.  In 2002, the Best Actress category was very uniform-the same five women kept showing up at virtually every precursor & predictions list.  The strange thing about this was that while there were several newcomers (including today's nominee, Salma Hayek, who in 2002 was best-known as Matthew Perry's love interest in Fools Rush In rather than the multi-hyphenate superstar she is today), this meant that Oscar was snubbing Meryl Streep, the reigning grand dame of this category.  This is the only time that Streep has had a lead role in a Best Picture nominee (The Hours) that she wasn't nominated for, despite her being superb in the film and having three of her costars be cited for it (so clearly the acting branch was watching the movie).  I was curious in coming into Frida what it was about Hayek's work here to mark one of the only disruptions the acting categories have had in the past 40 years in bucking Streep for a film that Academy loved.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The movie takes a look at the life of Frida Kahlo (Hayek), an artist who was not celebrated in her time & more so really just became famous starting in the 1970's (a much swifter path to painting icon than you'd assume), and while spreading across her whole life, largely focusing on her relationship with painter Diego Rivera (Molina), who was far better known during his lifetime as an artist of renown.  The movie looks at their marriages (not properly delineating exactly that there were two), Rivera's adultery, briefly Kahlo's bisexuality, and Frida's struggle to find her own voice through her work when everyone around her is focusing on Rivera.

Frida is hard to judge based on some of the stories surrounding its production.  Hayek was reportedly repeatedly harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein, who according to a recent piece she did in the New York Times, during production constantly sexually harassed her & pressured her for sex, and when she declined, he threw up huge roadblocks to stall the production, the biggest of which was getting four name-brand stars (Rush, Judd, Banderas, & Norton) to play small parts in the movie to give it more marketability.  Hayek achieved this, and it's impossible not to respect the film for existing under those conditions.

But as it is, it's not impressive.  Hayek's performance is middling-she doesn't bring a lot of dimensionality into her work as Frida Kahlo, with us always seeing her simply as a connection to Diego Rivera's work, but rarely as a woman of her own right.  This feels like a simplification of a woman who would not only become a prominent painter (admittedly in death), but celebrated as a global icon.  It's a paint-by-numbers biopic, even with Taymor adding her own flare to the conversation, and something that I felt less than impressed by as it went on.  The film's other nominations all feel cheap as well.  The Oscar-winning score is definitely prominent, but it frequently distracts from the story & becomes its own character, and the costumes & art directions, while borrowing from Kahlo's paintings, don't jaw-drop in the way that later attempts to do this in Loving Vincent and Mr. Turner would do.  It's a neat trick (especially with the art direction), but it's not consistent enough for us to really get into it, and the rest of the work feels too much like a film set, not enough authenticity like it's actually existing onscreen.  The Makeup work is really just the eyebrow (which, while iconic, doesn't make up for the fact that Hayek is dying the way that a heroine in the 1930's would be dying onscreen-a little bit of powdered makeup, but still unabashedly glamorous).  The only nomination I can kind of get onboard with is "Burn it Blue"-it's not a grand song, but it is catchy & it fits like a glove over the film...though it is sadly not one of the many musical moments of the piece, but instead just something they slapped onto the end credits.