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The froggy eyes of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera seemed to bulge out of their sockets, as if all-seeing, and Pablo Picasso's gaze bored into people with fulminating intensity. There is rich poetry, then, in Picasso having once remarked to Rivera that neither of them could paint eyes the way Frida Kahlo did.
The eyes that Kahlo (1907—1954) painted were often her own. The fiery wife of Rivera imbued her quiet incandescent gaze with the dark denseness of the cosmos, usually in an impassive expression that did little to mask the agony that lay bare on the rest of the canvas. The look in her eyes, nearly contemptuous, embodies the Frida Kahlo story: powerfully defying pain and self-pity before a culture, a fate, and a husband that would otherwise grind her into a mere victim.
This is the story that Frida, co-produced by and starring Salma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor (Titus), endeavors to tell. The tension between victimization and overcoming reverberated throughout Kahlo's life, and the trap before biopic-makers is to err on one side or the other—to portray her as either utterly pathetic or overly triumphant. Frida is self-conscious about the tension but fails to keep it taut.
The film's depiction of Kahlo's suffering from a skeleton-fracturing bus accident, from Rivera's infidelities, and from a miscarriage rises above the level of Spanish-language telenovelas, but not by much; as a result, her moments of overcoming are no more poignant. One doesn't go to a film about Kahlo's life without something to cry into, but in the end no handkerchief is necessary. What went wrong?
Key elements for a riveting film are in place: As Kahlo, the heretofore one-dimensional Hayek shows surprising depth and range, projecting both the firestorm and the varied winds of vulnerability in the artist. The script reflects the pointed wit of both Kahlo and Rivera (played with creamy smoothness by Alfred Molina), especially when it draws on things they really said or wrote. The film also goes a fair distance to surface the personal chemistry and artistic bond that made Kahlo and Rivera a compelling couple.
Director Taymor's forte—elaborate sets that capture the mood of an era—is on display here. She stirs the smokey bohemian air that artists gulped down in Marxism's heady days, when Mexico City, fresh off a revolution (1910-1917) that produced one of the world's first socialist constitutions, was second only to Moscow as a hothouse for Red intellectuals.
The director also enjoys playing with the sets, magically inserting Hayek's Kahlo into the artist's paintings, or, alternatively, having the paintings come to life. Interposing life and art was, after all, what Kahlo did. Sometimes the transitions from Kahlo's life to her art are a little bumpy, but Taymor turns the waking world into paintings (and vice versa) with daring and painstaking care, at times with breathtaking effect.
The paintings are beautiful, Hayek is beautiful, the sets are beautiful, and all this beauty is the soft kind to go with the candy-coating on the characters. Even Rivera is beautiful in his own slovenly way, occasionally mean but not as callous and infantile as the Rivera of history. The film can be forgiven for twisting history here and there—Hollywood is allowed to tell stories on its own terms—and for presenting a stylized portrait, a stylized life. But Taymor wants to have fun with the free-wheeling, sassy Frida more than render a tormented life in harsh strokes. Frida has all the bright, tropical colors of a Kahlo painting, but not enough of the gruesome jokes running through them.
The horrific events of her life parade by without disturbing us too much. Frida begins with Kahlo as a teenager, seemingly unhampered by the leg muscles that atrophied from polio when she was younger. At 18 comes the fateful bus accident, in which a trolley car's iron handrail impales her hip, exiting through her vagina; graphically yet dreamily depicted here, the accident required a series of painful operations to manage the effects of the damaged spine and pelvis. In a culture where Mary and motherhood are adored, Kahlo's fractured pelvis and spine frustrated her desire to have children. In the film, her abortion (as a result of her disability) and three miscarriages are scaled down to a single miscarriage, but at least there Taymor pulls no punches visually.
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