Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

I suppose there is some legitimacy to the idea that a life lived without taking any risks is not a life lived at all. That if you risk nothing, you gain nothing. There’s certainly some truth there - if we all stayed in our “comfort zone” day after day, never venturing outside our normal routine, never seeking out new experiences, we would probably be a pathologically bored species of creature. That said, there is such a thing as “acceptable risk”. The kind of risk likely to expand your world, bring you into contact with new people, broaden your horizons, as they say. Then there is the kind of risk that is far more likely to leave you dead. That would venture far into the realm of “unacceptable risk”. It is into this realm that the film Maria Full of Grace takes us.

Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a young woman, age seventeen to be precise, who lives in Colombia and helps support her family with her job at a flower packing plant. Her existence is not the slightest bit glamorous, her job is tedious, her boss demanding, her family irritating. She resents her sister for not helping with the family expenses and her mother for expecting her to pitch in more than she thinks is her share. Maria has a boyfriend who she seems to more tolerate than like. He bores her – she wants more out of her life – more excitement, something different - than he seems willing or able to provide. Finally things reach a boiling point for Maria and she turns a corner, one where “unacceptable risk” is the name of the game. Maria becomes a drug mule.

This is not a complicated story. We hear tales of people risking their lives to bring drugs into this country all the time. Mostly what we hear and see are little sound bytes about another drug bust, maybe with a blocked out face on the evening news. We suppose all sorts of things about these people, but we never really know anything about them. They aren’t the story. They’re simply the bad guys that got stopped at the border. Maria Full of Grace changes that. This isn’t a story about drugs; it’s a story about a girl. Not a one dimensional girl, either. It would have been easy to make Maria into either a hopelessly desperate and downtrodden soul with no options available to her other than the most extreme, or make her into a cookie cutter bad guy filled with greed and nothing else. The film wisely does neither. Maria is a girl, emphasis on girl. She isn’t yet a woman, despite her financial responsibilities. She’s a girl, full of restless energy, pride and the kind of youthful recklessness that leads her into more than one situation she isn’t fully prepared to handle. Maria is a girl masquerading as a woman and finding that this is a role with a lot more pitfalls than she thought.

Catalina Sandino Moreno is essentially the only person in this film. There are many supporting actors, but she is the absolute and undeniable center and without her incredible performance the film could not succeed. She takes this character and makes her at once frustrating and heartbreaking. She is able to effortlessly make Maria proud, stubborn, foolish and strong all at the same time. Her ability to (I hope) simulate the physical experience of this ordeal is amazing, the idea that people actually do this is made all the more horrifying by watching a young girl practice until she can accomplish this monstrous feat. Moreno has both the hard look of someone who lives a difficult life and the soft look of one who hopes for more. This is an outstanding performance, more than worthy of the Oscar nomination it received - quite a considerable feat for an actress in a foreign, subtitled film.

While Maria Full of Grace isn’t really a story about drugs, it is most definitely a story about mules. With Maria at the center, we see what these people go through to earn what seems to us to be a relatively paltry sum of money. The physical pressures of ingesting mass quantities of distinctly un-ingestible substances, the emotional toll it takes to try and maintain composure, the hard, cold fact that nobody cares if you live or die. All of these stories play out before us as we watch this girl, this teenager, lie and cheat for the chance to risk her life for people who would far rather see her dead than lose what she carries in her belly. We feel sorry for Maria on one level and want to shake her on many others. She doesn’t do this out of desperation; she does it out of pride. She takes a foolish chance to avoid a demeaning job; only to find that there is no place for pride in this world. She is not some princess that we want to save, she is far more real, her situation gritty and agonizing once she makes her choice. Writer/director Joshua Marston takes a chance by letting Maria be a full character rather than an easily sympathetic victim. We need to look at her choices, acknowledge the bad ones and recognize her for what she is, a girl who doesn’t really understand that her old life is not as bad as she thinks, that her choice of remedy is horribly vile and dangerous and that what she wants and how she chooses to get it have grave consequences. We also need to see past those choices and recognize that youth is not without its own risks, not without dangers and not, sometimes, without a level of certainty that one is immortal and that actions and consequences don’t always go together. Lastly, we need to ask ourselves what we might do in her place. Would we be so quick to turn down the chance to have a different sort of existence? Would we always recognize danger before it really grabbed us by the throat? Would we always be able to distinguish “acceptable” from “unacceptable” risk? Really, can we put ourselves in Maria’s shoes and be certain that we would not do the same as she? This, in the end, is what makes Maria Full of Grace more than just another scary story about drug muling and turns it into something of a smack in the face to anyone who thinks they know the whole story from the sound bytes on the news.

If there is one weak spot in the film, it’s the end, which has a few too many easy to spot predictabilities to it. This in no way lessens the power of the rest of the film, but the storyline doesn’t quite play out with the same level of moral ambiguity as the rest of the movie. This isn’t enough to offset all the complexity that comes before it, but it is enough to pull the film down just a bit.

Maria Full of Grace is a challenging film. It challenges perceptions of drug mules, it challenges the idea of what desperation might look like, it challenges you to both like and be fundamentally irritated by its main protagonist. It makes a life without risk seem remarkably appealing and provides a stellar example of the “unacceptable” kinds of risks that people are taking in this world every single day. On top of that, it gives us Maria, a full, rich palette of a character with which to paint every dubious choice, every questionable action, every harrowing foible. Do we like her or do we loathe her? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth the risk.


Recommended: Yes