Maria Full of Grace
(2004, Joshua Marston, Columbia/USA) [72 out of 100]
As I watched Catalina Sandino Moreno, as Maria Alvarez, practice swallowing her rubber-gloved pellets of heroin for her new job as drug mule, I was both utterly repulsed and somewhat humbly turned-on by the entire breadth of what this seventeen year old girl was doing.
-July 27, 2004
In her film debut, Moreno, one of the most naturally beautiful actresses to appear on screen, gives a tragically benevolent performance, with not even the slightest hint of inhibition or pretention in any moment of it. Her acting is so natural and seemingly unrehearsed, she makes us think she's been doing this all her life.
Maria is a seventeen year old girl living in Columbia and slaving all day in a floral sweatshop just to hand over her paychecks to her mother, grandmother, sister and nephew. She has also found out recently that she is pregnant - but when her boyfriend half-heartedly asks her to marry him, she declines because they don't love each other. Maria is the quintessential disenchanted lost little girl, which is what makes her such easy prey for the local drug lords to use for their own greed. Becoming a mule and transporting sixty pellets of heroin in her stomach, Maria travels to New York, along with three other mules (including her childish best friend) in order to shit the drugs out and get paid for their services. With threats of violence against her family back home, Maria is scared and, after a horrific incident involving one of these helpless mules, is on the run with a child inside her and nowhere to turn.
Rather subtly, but smartly filmed, never crossing that sometime-hard-to-see line into sentimentality, and keeping us in a constant state of tension during its second half - it is the brooding Moreno's (hopefully) star-making performance that keeps us enthralled from beginning to end, and it is the weary malaise of Moreno that is the envisioning heart and body of this film.