Maria Full of Grace (2004)

Although this was one movie I’d hoped to see on the big screen, it wasn’t at local theatres very long so I missed it.  When I finally rented the video, the timeframe to watch it with anyone in my family didn’t seem to work for them either.  (I suspect the subtitles were turnoffs.)  I wound up watching it alone, not something I normally enjoy doing.

Funny though, how you can spend 90 minutes "reading" a movie, but a day later have forgotten that it was sub-titled.  And that’s a GOOD thing, right?  (Apologies to Martha Stewart.)

I liked Maria Full of Grace very much.  The main reason I appreciated it was that it was so full of surprises, so absent of the violence and seamy underside of what you would expect from a story about Colombian heroin smugglers.

I disagree with Popcorn on a small point, that of Maria’s boss being unreasonable. On the contrary, the owner of the flower shop was very reasonable and gave Maria several chances to pull her load in the production line that was his flower shop.  Chances she intentionally ignored.  In fact, I thought she was goading him into firing her because she really didn’t want to work there but didn’t dare quit.  Instead, Maria kept pushing the envelope until a REASONABLE boss/supervisor could no longer look past the damage her shenanigans were causing to both production and employee morale.  He had no choice but to let her go – and I thought he did it rather gently too.

Maria was restless.  She wanted out…. out of the responsibility of being the breadwinner in her mostly female family; out from the going-nowhere relationship with her boyfriend, and out from what she saw as an existence with no hope for a future beyond picking thorns from roses in a flower shop.  Maria knew full well that the adventure she was preparing herself for was illegal and dangerous, but that was irrelevant to her primary goal of getting out and, not incidentally, getting well paid for it.  If she was half as scared as she should have been of the potential dangers, she showed very little evidence of it.  But I suppose that’s one of the blessings of youth: ignorance.

Throughout the movie I kept waiting for the violence, the shootings, the beatings, or at least the victimization of young females by big, bad, cigar-chewing lechers and drug lords. But it didn’t happen that way. The motel where the girls were ushered to ‘relieve’ themselves of their booty was a seedy place and ultimately a bloody setting, but the unsavory middlemen to whom the smugglers were to pass the drugs did nothing more than insult and verbally threaten their temporary wards. When Maria and her companion took off with their cohort’s share of the drug money (or was it the pellets, I can’t seem to remember), I was sure they would be caught, beaten and raped, if not killed.  Again a surprise.  I almost found myself sympathizing with these guys… who were, after all, part of the same game for the same reason and had the same stakes.

The story was so well crafted that it did indeed feel seems like a documentary.  The business of getting young women to swallow upwards of 30 walnut-sized plastic-wrapped pellets at a time to smuggle heroin into the US was fascinating.  The director’s notes on the DVD were equally compelling and as interesting as the story of Maria.

It won’t make a lot of money and will unfortunately soon be forgotten, but this video is worth buying and keeping in one’s library.  It was for me a realistic glimpse into the everyday lives of everyday people whose world happens to be part of the international drug scene.  It was every bit as informative as the movie, Traffic.