First-time director(/writer) Joshua Marston's "María Full of Grace" acquired many awards, including the Audience Award at Sundance in 2004, and as its title character Catalina Sandino Moreno received an Oscar nomination as best actress. The movie was critically acclaimed, on epinions, as elsewhere. I am writing about it to register my dissent from the consensus.

The first time I tried to watch "María Full of Grace" it put me to sleep while María was still working in a factory in Colombia dethorning long-stem roses. On a second try, I made it through to the very predictable final scene, though I found most of the movie boring. What wasn't predictable was implausible.

For me, the best scenes were those in which the 17-year-old María is unimpressed by the boyfriend who offers to "do the right thing" and marry her, when she learns that she is pregnant. She has limited choices, but makes a right one in declining his offer. She follows that by making the very dubious choice of undertaking a trip to New York as a "mule" (or "swallower"), smuggling cocaine (I think not heroin).

I realize that the drug cartel does not place much value on its low-level staff, but I find it hard to believe that there is so little screening of the poise and reliability of those outfitted with passports, visas, plane tickets, and sent off with drugs worth large sums in the United States. I would think that protecting the investment in the "mules," would mandate providing them, if not a rehearsal of the kind of interrogation US customs and immigration inspectors will give, at least supplying them answers to the standard questions of who paid for the tickets, what the purpose of the trip is, etc.

Plot-spoiler alert

On the Bogotí-New York flight with María are three other "mules," including her mentor of sort (who coached her to practice swallowing whole grapes, Lucy (Giulied Lopez), María's stubborn and not-very-bright friend from her village Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), and another whom I don't think is named. This last one is apprehended after being x-rayed. María consents to be x-rayed, but since she is pregnant, cannot be. The other two must not have been x-rayed, though Blanca strikes me as the one most likely to be singled out for examination. Lucy has been getting sick on the flight. That bags sometimes burst and kill the swallower was foreshadowed. The reason that Lucy is the one (on her third trip) is that she has a relative in New York.

After Lucy dies (messily, but offscreen), María flees with Blanca in tow. (The sullen pickup men would leave so many drugs behind, unguarded while disposing of the body???)

María goes to Lucy's sister, Carla (Patricia Rae), waits all day for her to return, and then, claiming to be a friend of Carla, successfully pleas to be allowed to stay in the cramped apartment for a few nights. I have more plausibility problems with this, and that María does not tell Carla what has happened. Like María, Carla is pregnant. Carla tells María she has stayed in the difficult new country, so that her child will be born an American. (I don't know if Carla is an illegal immigrant. María is that and a felon.)

Increasingly of late, I have resented being manipulated by film-makers to root for robbers and murderers and drug smugglers to escape detection and evade pursuit. I have already noted that I understand that María has few good options, but this is not sufficient for me to find the customs agents who suspect her of carrying drugs in her body villains. Her (unrehearsed, unprepared) answers to questions should send up red flags, and it would seem to me perfectly reasonable to detain her and see what comes out. I refuse to root for her to succeed in her job as a drug carrier.

Second, she has swallowed 50 or 60 pellets of lethal drugs without any apparent thought to the danger to her baby.

Third, she uses and lies to Carla in ways that Carla and I find unconscionable.

Will María go and sin no more? Well, as an illegal immigrant, her choices will continue to be limited and the threat of deportation will continue to hang over her.

End of plot-spoiler alert

In my scoring, she has three strikes already, and my sympathy for her plight is considerably less the amount that she seems to have stimulated many other viewers to feel. I find Blanca insufferable and María gets some points for having any patience with Blanca (even strained patience).

In my view, the only sympathetic Colombian characters are Carla, her husband (Fernando Velasquez), and the (real-life) fixer for the large Colombian-immigrant community in Queens, the "Mayor of Little Colombia,'' Orlando Tobin. (His presence significantly contributes to the documentary feel, in marked contrast to the plot device who is Lucy.) I sympathize with the customs agents more than with María. There are also some characters less sympathetic than María, notably those collecting the pellets, who treat the women less well than real pack animals are treated.

The low-budget production used locations well. I am less impressed by the editing (done by Anne McCabe and Lee Percy) and the screen-writing (Marston's) than some other reviewers have been, since I found the movie boring most of the way through and predictable except when unbelievable.

I also don't see Catalina Sandino Moreno running through much of a "gamut of emotions." Fear, frustration, hopelessness, confusion, anguish, and guilt are not much of a "gamut." She seems to me more numb than poised, though at least somewhat plucky—and manipulative (especially of Carla).

There are a few moments of what one might interpret as "grace" for María, but she is filled literally with toxic chemicals, and metaphorically with the opposite of grace, selfishness, so I find the title offensive as well as inapt. And I very much doubt that anyone else is going to attain a state of grace consuming María's cargo or reaping the profits from their sales. ("María Full of Grapes" is more apt, a parody title invited by the sanctimonious one.) I'm surprised that no one has complained the the title is blasphemous (in regard to what the movie's María kis filled with and extrudes).

Better choices: for representation of the tough road north for those not smuggling drugs and supplied flights and papers: "El Norte" and "Sin Nombre" and the later (better, but still less than great) Colombian "Paraiso Travel"; for the huiliations of immigrant life here, "Take Out" (and "Pariso Travel"); for the nihilistic life in Colombia: "Our Lady of the Assassins." And, on drug trafficking: the BBC miniseries "Traffic" (not the absurd Hollywood remake).

©2005, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No