While there seems to be quite an Oscar buzz surrounding Salma Hayek’s recent portrayal of Frida Kahlo (in the movie of the same name), let me be the first to say that if taking your top off and growing a unibrow constitutes good acting, then give me my Oscar right now. As the movie unfolds, the framing never leaves either Hayek’s assets or her facial hair, which does most of her acting for her as it grows dramatically throughout the film and is eventually accompanied by a tiny female mustache representative of the traumatic life she lived.
Frida has been in too many hands for too long. Originally, Madonna felt she needed to play the role and J Lo followed suit, but it was Salma Hayek who bought the rights, telling the Mexican artist’s story as only a Mexican artist can. The result of at least four screenwriters (including Hayek’s boyfriend Edward Norton), the script gives us Kahlo’s life as a chronology of events that don’t illuminate any particular aspect of it, but skate from episode to episode, each marked dramatically by another of her paintings. In addition, by concentrating almost exclusively on the tumultuous love story between Kahlo and her philandering Communist husband Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), the story loses much of its impact. Frida is relegated to the periphery of the narrative, merely reacting to what her more interesting friends are doing.
I’m mostly indifferent to Hayek’s talents; the real reason I wanted to see this movie was the direction of Julie Taymor, who floored me with her grotesquely beautiful vision of Shakespeare’s Titus. While Taymor creates some breathtaking scenes that convey Kahlo’s uniquely subjective artistic vision, and freezes the space between real life and the artist’s self-portraiture, she never quite manages to convey Kahlo’s motivations to us. Also, the excessive cameos (Ashley Judd shares a brief lesbian dance scene with Hayek, Antonio Banderas speaks four lines and disappears, and Norton plays John Rockefeller for about 40 seconds) put stars where mere actors are needed, proving more of a distraction than anything else.
While there are electrifying moments in the film (mostly as a result of Taymor’s visual brilliance) they seem at odds with the rest of the film, which is conventional and often boring. It takes all of the elements of a good story and delivers it like the Encyclopedia Britannica, complete with pictures along the way.
