Movie Reviews
Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) lives in a cramped house in Columbia with her mother, her sister, and her sister’s daughter. She works at a flower factory where she de-thorns roses for hours and hours every day, getting little pay. When Maria repeatedly keeps getting sick at work, her boss becomes sterner, and she has enough of it. Much against the wishes of her needy family, she quits.
We find that her vomiting is due to an unexpected pregnancy by her boyfriend. In an encounter with him, Maria tells of their little problem. They think about their options and he suggests they get married. The obstacle there is that they don’t love each other. After a short scuffle, they end it and go their separate ways, deciding she’ll have the baby.
Maria meets Franklin (John Alex Toro), and begin, I guess you could call it, dating. He learns of her unemployment and offers her a job as a mule. Careful thought leads her to believe that her family’s well-being is more important than her safety. She agrees and is assigned the job of traveling to New York City with a kilo of drugs. The drugs (probably cocaine) are tediously stuffed into small condom-like capsules, and she is forced to swallow sixty-two of them. The scene where this occurs is so well-done that I felt my stomach lurch forward.
To describe what happens on the trip their and back would be to look up the word “awry” in the dictionary and read it verbatim. That’s why “Maria Full of Grace” works. We see so many drug movies where the deal works out, and then the rookies get hooked and it all goes downhill. But “Maria” is smarter and more hard-hitting than that. It is a drug all itself – one that I couldn’t look away from because of how real it is. In fact, it is so real and Moreno is so good as Maria, that we feel we can empathize with the characters – we feel we’ve gone through it all too.
Where it loses itself is in the goes-both-ways ending. I think, perhaps, the filmmakers wanted it to be triumphant, but it led me to believe that the choice made was the wrong choice. With a film as personal as this, I couldn’t take conclusion like that. *** ˝