FRIDA (2002)  **1/2

Reviewed 10/29/02

Biopics have always been pitfalls for filmmakers, and all the more so when they are about artists.  Excessive respect for the individual and for historical veracity threaten to turn even the best ideas into stolid, reverential affairs or, on the other side of the coin, clichés about tortured artists whose creativity teeters on the edge of lunacy.  Director Julie Taymor tries to sidestep both with FRIDA, but she cannot quite escape its feeble scripting.

FRIDA is based on Hayden Herrera’s biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, famous for her intimate, often surreal self-portraitures which would later make her a feminist icon.  The movie was a labor of love for lead actress Salma Hayek, who is also one of the film’s producers.   Enlisting Julie Taymor, the avant-garde puppeteer and filmmaker, who is unfortunately still best known for the stage version of THE LION KING, Hayek beat out film versions of Kahlo’s life pursued by both Madonna and Jennifer Lopez.  Of course, making a movie in Hollywood about a Communist, atheist, bisexual artist whose most prominent physical features are a monobrow and female moustache is not the simplest achievement.

Taymor’s FRIDA follows Kahlo’s life from her trolley accident when she was a teenager to her final years (she died in 1954 at age 47).  The trolley wreck severely damaged her spine and pelvis causing Frida (Hayek) to have multiple surgeries and live in pain for the rest of her life.  Here, as with most of her life, Frida’s parents (Roger Rees and Patricia Reyes Spíndola) and sister (Mía Maestro) give her warm and loving support.  After the accident, her young lover (Diego Luna) leaves her, and Kahlo encounters and falls for Mexico’s most famous muralist, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina).  Despite knowing that Rivera is a compulsive womanizer, she still marries him.  His mistresses infuriate her, but she gains some measure of revenge by seducing some of them herself.  She also takes on Soviet refugee, Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush), for a lover.  Slowly, she rises out of Rivera’s shadow as her own works start to garner recognition.

Hayek, with her glamorous, rectangular face, knockout body, and a nose that’s an architectural marvel of straightness, may be too voluptuous for the artist, but she gives the part her all.  It’s a strong performance that needs less acting and more embodying.  Hayek is adequate but not wholly convincing.  Taymor supplies a dynamic presentation with vivid colors, unexpected camera angles, and most especially moments of playfulness with dreamlike montages and transitions.  Yet FRIDA lacks the raw, unflinching audaciousness of Taymor’s TITUS.  The screenplay by a horde of writers (Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, and Anna Thomas) comes across as too pedestrian and is populated by formulaic and often ridiculous dialogue.   The writing also reduces the film’s main thematic concern to something really square in this world of transgressive bohemians – fidelity.  Even then, for all the passion on display, the film feels positively chaste.  (Though, it should be noted that Taymor had extensive run-ins with Miramax head-honcho Harvey Weinstein over the final cut.)  While the film touches on the difficult role of women, even wealthy and successful ones, in the first half of the Twentieth Century, it is more a checklist of highlights from the artist’s life.  Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, and Hayek’s real life boyfriend, Edward Norton, make cameos.