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Maria Full of Grace [VHS]

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In this week's "Entertainment Weekly" Stephen King picked "Maria Full of Grace" as his favorite film of 2004, which is certainly an interesting thing to know before watching this independent film from writer-director Joshua Marston. The picture on the DVD cover shows Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) posed as if she were about to receive Holy Communion. Only instead of receiving the host Maria is about to swallow a pellet containing heroin wrapped in the finger of a latex glove. That particular image is not present in the film with as much symbolism as it is on the cover, but it does represent the crucible of Maria's odyssey.

Maria is 17 and works in Colombia picking the thorns off of roses before they are shipped overseas. Although she is clearly a bright girl, Maria discovers that she is pregnant. To make things worse her boyfriend is a loser, her boss at work is a jerk, and her family needs her to provide money. So after Maria quits her job she is introduced to a man in Bogotá who will give her $5,000 for flying to New York City with 62 of those pellets in her stomach as a "mule" for a drug lord. For Maria that amount is a virtual fortune and seems worth the risk that one of those pellets could break in her stomach and kill her. So she practices swallow grapes so that she will be able to do what needs to be done to get her money.

There will be several mules on this particular flight, a practice known as "shotgunning" that Marston learned about and which inspired his original script. The idea is that if you put several mules on the same plane and plan on U.S. Customs catching one of them, which would make it easier for the rest of the drugs to get through. Also on the plane with Maria are her friend, Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), who is jealous of the money her friend is going to make, a mule on her third run, Lucy (Giulied Lopez), who wants to visit her sister in New York City, and at least one more experience drug smuggler.

"Maria Full of Grace" sets the stage for the big trip by paying attention to the process by which Maria first practices, and then swallows all those pellets. This serves to underscore how dangerous this is going to be and you know that something is going to go horribly wrong. It is just a question of how many of these girls will be dead by the time it is all over and what exactly Maria will do to earn the sobriquet of the title. Marston does touch on all of the mules on the plane, but the focus of the story is on Moreno and her compelling performance. Clearly Marston is out to make a point, but because this is a low-budget independent film he is forced to tell it simply. Ironically, his leading actress is so good that we are concerned more with her survival than any stinging indictment of the use of mules by Colombian drug cartels.

Catalina Sandino Moreno won the best actress award a the 2004 Berlin Film Festival along with Charlize Theron in "Monster," which is interesting simply because the performances are pretty much at opposite ends of the acting spectrum. Since "Maria Full of Grace" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2004, where it won the Audience Award, Moreno's performance would be eligible for the next Academy Awards. Usually Oscar nominations focus on movies released in December and as a rule ignore anything released before the Summer blockbuster season, but what Moreno did in this film might be too impressive to forget (Addendum: For once I was right and Moreno is nominated for Best Actress).

Maria Full of Grace is a moving and powerful motion picture about a girl who goes in over her head when she longs for a better life. We follow Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) from her dead end job stripping roses in Colombia to a new opportunity--becoming a "mule," by ingesting drugs in large capsules and smuggling them to New Jersey. What follows is a gritty, fast-paced, and suspense-filled story

Remember the name Catalina Sandino Moreno. The heartfelt and harrowing performance she gives here has won her a heap of awards and I am sure there are many more to come. First-time director Joshua Marston, who also wrote the taut screenplay, shows Maria being taught how to swallow drugs wrapped in packets -- she sips soup to make them go down without gagging. If the drugs in her belly should seep out during Maria's turbulent jet flight to New York, she could be poisoned or arrested or both. Marston builds incredible tension. But it's the human drama etched on Moreno's young, weary face that gives Maria its potent punch.

This Winner of the Audience Award at Sundance is a terrific film; shocking, engrossing, and entertaining. But what makes Maria Full of Grace an extraordinary experience is its ability to be ordinary. We see everyday life here, plausible motives, convincing decisions, and characters who live at ground level. The movie's suspense is heightened by being generated entirely at the speed of life, and showing us what probably would happen, and not some implausible fairy-tale.

Painful and ugly, Maria Llena de Gracia is also a powerful experience of vicarious desperation and deprivation. The story of a village girl in Colombia whose family, novio, and job all fail her at the same moment. She rushes heedlessly into big trouble, which in Colombia can only mean the cocaine trade. Coke merchants and smugglers are not nice people; we know that, and to see this film as an indictment of their viciousness is only a fraction of the movie's content. It's also, and more importantly an indictment of the global economy, the Octopus of our era with far stronger tentacles than the railroad of the early 20th Century. The indictment is clear from the first scene of the movie, when ALL the young women of the community report for work through a high wire fence to the warehouse where roses are trimmed and wrapped for export to North America. There is no other work in the village, no subsistence, no options, no future. If it were in Mexico - and there are exactly the same horrible sweat-shops in NAFTAfied Mexico - one would have at least the option of illegal emigration to El Norte, but in Colombia, it's 'muling' drugs or maid service. Frankly, I doubt that many American viewers of this film really saw what it was about from the Colombian perspective. Stopping the drug traffic isn't just a matter of spraying lethal chemicals over the countryside or supplying arms and helicopters to the latifundistas who own the government, and it isn't just a matter of reducing demand from the two poles of American society - the marginalized Black and the overprivileged White - either. It's a matter of facilitating the recovery of a diverse local economy, in which most people can make a living and a few can even find opportunity without crime and violence.

The Spanish spoken in this film, by the way, is extremely hard to catch unless you've heard the rural dialects before. The "vos" forms are used throughout (vosotros in Spain, the second person plural) and slang is pervasive. Even my son, who went to public elementary school in Spain and who speaks like a native, had to have the English subtitles.

Director Joshua Marston made MARIA FULL OF GRACE on a tight budget, but the result is a compelling closely-focused film which documents a segment of the drug trade while managing to avoid the obvious stereotypes. The story centers around the unhappy teenaged rose-worker Maria, played wonderfully by newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno, who agrees to swallow heroin for transport to New York in return for a big payoff.

The orchestration and consequences of a single drug run from Colombia to New York comprise the main dramatic content of this film. Throughout, Marston pointedly avoids the caricatures commonly found in the drug film genre. Maria, unhappy throughout, is nevertheless not on the edge of desperation when she makes her choice to become a drug mule. The Colombian drug lord is not the menacing figure one might expect, at least as he is portrayed interviewing Maria for the job and preparing her for her journey. Even the U.S. Customs agents in New York, conceivably an irresistible target for filmmakers with a "message," are portrayed as professional and sympathetic.

One is continuously struck by the detailed realism and honesty of the film; Marston insisted upon using only Colombian actors in the roles of Colombians (though he filmed largely in Ecuador), and the other small details of the movie are indicative of the extensive research that went into its making. That the movie made a profound impact in Colombia, where it premiered, testifies strongly to its authenticity. The story is powerful and horrible and realistic, but one can also perceive a hopeful optimism in it by the end.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE is not always an easy film to watch, and some of the more disturbing images are bound to linger on the mind longer than one might wish. Nevertheless, I could not give a stronger recommendation than the one I give for this movie. Every performance in this film is top rate.

The DVD release of MARIA FULL OF GRACE includes the original and international trailers of the film as well as a helpful and enlightening audio commentary from director Joshua Marston.

Jeremy W. Forstadt

Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a seventeen year old living a poor farming life in Columbia with her mother, sister and her niece whose father has deserted them. After losing her only job in her community, Maria finds herself involved with smuggling heroin into the USA. This would give her enough money to start a new life in what is referred to as `the magical land' (El Norte). Desperate, she finds herself in a situation completely unlike she expected and meets tragedy and betrayals everywhere she goes. However, there are those kind enough to understand her and support her - if she manages to live. Moreno was up for Best Actress for this role, which is uncommon for a non-UK or American actress.

"Maria llenas eres de gracia," is one of the outstanding films of the new century, and one of the best I've seen in months. Joshua Marston, who wrote the script and directed, took a commercial idea--that of telling a story about the "mulas" who smuggle drugs into the US by swallowing pellets of cocaine or (in this case) heroin wrapped in latex which they later excrete. Should one of them burst before it is passed out of the body, it is likely the mule will die. It's a risky business in more ways than one, and only somebody desperate or foolish would do it.

So the first thing that Marston must do is establish Maria's character in such a way that we can believe she would do something like this. She is, on the one hand, an ordinary 17-year-old Columbian girl who works stripping the thorns from the stems of roses in a factory. She lives at home with her mother, sister and her sister's baby. She has a boyfriend. She has to work to help support the family. On the other hand she is a headstrong person, a pretty girl with a head on her shoulders.

But Maria is not exactly desperate. She is a bit of a gambler, somewhat foolish, no doubt, but she is also a strong person with great personal integrity. Marston allows us to see in the beginning of the film that she will take chances that others won't. She climbs up onto the roof of a building, a climb her boyfriend is afraid to make. We see her tell her boss (more or less) to take this job and shove it when he won't let her go to the bathroom. And we realize shortly thereafter why she needs to go to the bathroom more often than usual. We watch her tell her boyfriend about her predicament, and she does it in such a way that we can tell that she is searching for how he really feels. And when she finds out he doesn't really love her, at least doesn't love her the way she wants to be loved, she leaves him.

But now she is in a fix. Her job helped pay for the family's bills. Now the situation is set. Her character is set. The premise of the film can unwind: and so she meets a young man on a motorcycle who tells her how she can make some serious money smuggling drugs into the US.

Imagine how the average Hollywood director would fashion a movie from such a premise. There would be brutality, gun fights, car chases. Cardboard villains would exploit Maria and others like her. There would be some heroics and perhaps a knight in shining armor would save Maria.

But that is not how Marston plays it. He opts for realism and he doesn't wallow in the violence or the exploitation. He keeps the focus on Maria and her personal struggle to find herself and to deal with the circumstances she has gotten into. The characters are real, the situations are authentic, and the details are closely observed and realistic. We see Maria practice swallowing large globe grapes. We see the people in the drug-smuggling business and some of the other mules. We see the security people at the airport and the young men who watch the girls until the pellets are passed. There is no glamor among these characters. It is clear they are patterned after real people who could actually be in this ugly business. And in the end we see the triumph of Maria's character.

What makes this such an outstanding movie is not only the careful, clear and veracious way that Marston tells the story, but the compelling performance by Catalina Sandino Moreno who plays Maria. She is a very talented young actress who has the kind of beauty that suggests something close to nobility of character, if I may use such an old-fashioned phrase. It is this quality of hers that Marston captures and emphasizes. The result is one of the most arresting performances I've seen in quite a while. Moreno appears entirely real, completely divorced from any phony celluloid heroine. She became to me--and this is what all great actors can do--someone I know, someone I care about, and I was filled with emotion as the movie ended.

"This is a movie about a girl becoming a woman," is the way Moreno expressed it. Marston puts it this way, "I realized...I was making a film about a girl who was doing something universal in trying to figure out the meaning of her life." This is really what the story is about: becoming a woman in this world of risks and trade-offs, of dangers and obligations.

A movie that is a work of art and worthy of something more than the diversion of an evening should affect the viewer emotionally, intellectually and artistically. Maria Full of Grace is such a movie, a movie that comes along perhaps once a year, or perhaps only once in several years. It's that good.

By all means see this for Catalina Sandino Moreno who was nominated for Best Actress by the Academy in 2005 but lost out to Hilary Swank for her performance in Million Dollar Baby (2004). And see it for Joshua Marston who made it real.

Too many contradicting adjectives to describe this movie, but they all fit. As an American who lived in Colombia and who currently works in the flower industry (in the US) I know many stories of the laborers who work at farm level. To most, the US is a goal to be reached but unfortunately some (as portrayed in this movie) have no other choice but to work as a "mule". Maria's story can be the story of any number of people who have been duped into believing that transporting drugs is relatively "fool-proof". I am glad that Catalina Sandino-Moreno and Joshua Marston got the recognition that they deserved in the film industry because the film itself is very well acted and it captivates the viewer. Unfortunately it is necessary to show Colombia's ugly side in order to tell this story accurately. Haunting and hopeful.

The most realistic story about drug traffic you'll ever see. This movie shows how colombian cocaine is infiltrated into the U.S. using people as "mules". Very accurate film on the subject. You can see how mules are recruited, why they agree to do it, and how they operate. What makes this film different is that none of the mules are thugs or oulaws, just regular women with regular dreams. What a debut for Catalina Sandino, unfortunately she didn't get the oscar...but she may get one soon

"Maria Full of Grace" is brutal, understated, unflinching cinema. It grabbed my attention without reaching for it; it held my attention without ostentation, without the need for building music, slow motion, computer effects or an obvious soundtrack.

It is a scary, jolting dose of a reality - or what could be reality - where a young Columbian girl, Maria, just 17 years old, quits her job cutting and arranging flowers after being treated unfairly by her boss. Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) needs money to support her household, occupied by her mother, grandmother, sister and sister's baby, and she becomes desperate when she discovers she is pregnant.

A friend Maria meets at a party tells her about a difficult job she could do. He tells Maria she will need to transport tiny capsules of heroin - stored in her pregnant stomach - to New Jersey, a place, she is told, is just a "small town outside of New York."

Maria accepts the job, as do two other women she knows: one who is a friend, and one who is making a delivery to New Jersey for the third time.

First time writer/director Joshua Marston does not waste any time with meaningless, self-conscious, uneven scenes as many first-timers often do. In the first 10 minutes of the movie, I immediately liked Maria. I understood her character, her nuances, her worries, her hopes and her attitude. Moreno, as Maria, is a charming, comely and vulnerable teenager with whom I cared for and sympathized.

Since Maria's personality is well established in the first 30 minutes, and her choices stayed consistent and realistic throughout the movie, I believed each action she chose to take. I never shook my head or disagreed with any event in the plot; instead, I watched the unbearable tension unfold logically and skillfully.

I watched Maria standing in an airplane, sweating, nearly crying, trying to keep 60 heroin capsules in her stomach, thinking about her baby, worrying what could happen to her family if she threw up, worried that she could die if one tablet would break. I watched with unbreakable interest, completely invested in the characters and their gruesome situation.

"Maria Full of Grace" is not just engaging in its laudable moments of tension, disaster and disappointment - it also allows us to glimpse an intriguing and surprising story of an abject woman in a country we know little about.

In many instances, the film creates a powerful glimpse of the dichotomy of North America and South America, of Hispanics living among Caucasians. It's a startling, depressing vision, and although the differences are shown upon the backdrop of a young, scared, confused woman delivering heroin pills, "Maria Full of Grace" is able to maintain a documentary-like feel, where we are being edified about the difficult, and in this case, illegal, struggles some Columbian people endure.

But the movie never begs us to feel educated and aware; that feeling comes through naturally in the subtle skills of the writing, acting and directing, all of which come together to deliver the best movie of the year: a movie that has an understated, powerful tone that takes the efforts of many current films reaching for profundity and completely destroys them.

Catalina Sandino Moreno recently won a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her stunning portrayal of Maria in Joshua Marston's "Maria Full of Grace." This was a debut performance for Ms. Sandino Moreno, a native of Bogotá, Colombia, who developed an interest in acting while in high school. She subsequently studied theater and acting and caught Marston's eye when she auditioned for this part. He took a risk by casting the inexperienced young actress as Maria and, in return, she delivered - bringing tremendous depth to the complex and demanding role.

Seventeen year-old Maria Alvarez works on a flower plantation outside Bogotá, stripping thorns off roses in preparation for shipping. It's a dead-end job and her future doesn't look to improve much. A spirited, independent young women, with a sense of adventure, she is obviously bored with the work and her abusive supervisor, disenchanted with her immature boyfriend, and fed-up with her family, which receives almost her entire paycheck. When Maria discovers she is pregnant, she accepts the offer to carry drugs to the US as a mule. There is no way, however, that she could have imagined the nightmarish and threatening world she becomes involved with.

Films about the drug trade abound, from this year's "El Rey," (also up for an Academy Award), to "Traffic," "Veronica Guerin," "Trainspotting," "Blow," even 1971's extraordinary "The French Connection," to name a few. However, "Maria Full of Grace" offers a totally different perspective on the business of drugs and drug smuggling. Even though the primary focus is on the mules here, a much broader picture is portrayed. It is painful, and extremely intense, to watch the desperate Maria force herself to swallow almost 70 thumb-sized pellets filled with finely powered heroin. She takes medication first to slow her digestion, all the while under the watchful eye of her runner. The danger of discovery and death is ever present, as is the potential risk to her family if anything goes wrong. A Colombian mule can earn between $5000. to $8000. per trip. Considering that the average annual per capita income is around $2,000, one gets a general understanding of why the girl might imperil herself to this extent. I felt a terrible sense of sadness throughout much of the movie. This particular film does conclude on a hopeful note, I think - for Maria anyway.

Marston, who directed from his own script, takes us through the entire harrowing run in a manner so realistic that I felt I was watching a documentary at times. The building tension on the commercial plane flight to New York had me literally on the edge of my seat. And Catalina Sandino Moreno is a natural - absolutely gifted! This film is outstanding - certainly
one of the best movies to be made on the subject. The supporting cast also deserves kudos, with special mention to Yenny Paola Vega, who plays the tenacious Blanca, and to Orlando Tobon - who is not a professional actor. His character, Don Fernando, is taken from fact not fiction. In Jackson Heights, Queens, Orlando Tobon is called the "mayor of Little Colombia." He makes his living as an accountant and travel agent, but he also serves his community as a social service counselor and all-purpose guide to many of the thousands of Colombian immigrants who come to live in his ethnically diverse Queens neighborhood. Tobon is also known as "the undertaker of the mules" for his work helping families repatriate the remains of Colombians who die smuggling drugs into New York.
JANA