Film Review: Maria Full of Grace

If you were like me and missed the film Maria Full of Grace (2004) when it came out a few years ago, then it’s time you discover this gem at your local video store or slide it to the top of your Netflix Queue, as the case may be. This is a film of great strength and emotion. It was written and directed by Joshua Marston, his first feature film, and stars Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria Alvarez. Despite this being Moreno’s first film performance, she was nominated for an Oscar in the category of best actress in a leading role, which was well deserved. Moreno portrays Maria, a seventeen year old girl from Bogotá, Columbia, who quits her job as a long-stem rose de-thorner after an episode of morning sickness leads to a dehumanizing confrontation with her boss. Maria’s boyfriend makes a half-hearted attempt to do what he thinks is the right thing about her pregnancy, but Maria preempts his decision by taking matters into her own hands, deciding to take a job as a drug mule and smuggle narcotics in her stomach (where now metaphorically life and death simultaneously reside) into the United States. What’s great about Moreno’s performance, as well as the writing of Maria’s character (the screenplay), is that it explores Maria as a pawn of poverty, circumstance and large scale corruption without reducing her to a stereotype or victimizing her character. Instead Maria displays quiet strength: she’s the one who “dumps” her boyfriend, and she’s the one who quits her job. These examples show Maria as a person who has the emotional strength to cut ties before the other party has the opportunity to do so, which may partly be a sign of strength but also partly be a coping mechanism for dealing with situations that escalate beyond her control, and, indeed, there are many circumstances she’s involved in that are far beyond her control.

What makes this film so great is not only Marston’s excellent writing and the superb performance by Moreno, but also the success the film has in navigating very important contemporary topics like poverty, drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and a woman’s right to choose without ever seeming like a piece of propaganda. Rather the film does a great job of capturing the humanness of Maria, setting that up as the centerpiece of the narrative, and letting the big issues develop in the background. In other words, the film is as much about what Maria has the power to control as what she doesn’t. Along the way there are scenes of emotional intensity, and the film culminates, as the title suggests, in a moment of grace, in the quiet beauty of self-sacrifice amidst a world of greed and corruption.