Youth and Consequences
Main Cast: Catalina Sandino Moreno
Director: Joshua Marston
I suppose there is some legitimacy to the idea that a life lived without risk is a live unlived. If we all stayed in our comfort zone day after day, never venturing outside our normal routine, never seeking out new experiences, we would probably be pathologically bored. That said, there is such a thing as acceptable risk. The kind of risk likely to expand your world, bring you into contact with new people, broaden your horizons, as they say. Then there is the kind of risk that is far more likely to leave you dead. It is into this realm that the Spanish film Maria Full of Grace takes us.
Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a a 17-year-old girl who lives in Colombia and helps support her family with her job at a flower packing plant. Her job is tedious, her boss demanding, her family irritating. She resents her sister for not helping with the family expenses and her mother for expecting her to pitch in more than she thinks is her share. Maria has a boyfriend who she seems to more tolerate than like. He bores her. She wants more out of her life – more excitement, something different – than he seems willing or able to provide. Things reach a boiling point for Maria and she turns a corner, one where unacceptable risk is the name of the game. Maria becomes a drug mule.
This is not a complicated story. We hear tales of people risking their lives to bring drugs into this country all the time but we never really know anything about the people involved. They aren’t the story. They’re simply the bad guys that got stopped at the border. Maria Full of Grace changes that.
This isn’t a story about drugs; it’s a story about a girl. Not a one dimensional girl, either. It would have been easy to make Maria either a hopelessly desperate and downtrodden soul with no options available to her other than the most extreme, or make her into a cookie cutter bad guy filled with greed and nothing else. The film wisely does neither. Maria is a girl, emphasis on girl. She’s a teenager, despite her financial responsibilities. She’s full of restless energy, pride, and the kind of youthful recklessness that leads her into situations she isn’t prepared to handle. Maria is a girl masquerading as a woman and finding that this role has more pitfalls than she thought.
Catalina Sandino Moreno is essentially the only person in Maria Full of Grace. There are many supporting actors, but she is the absolute and undeniable center. Without her incredible performance the film would fail. She takes this character and makes her at once frustrating and heartbreaking. She makes Maria proud, stubborn, foolish, and strong all at the same time. Her ability to simulate the physical experience of this ordeal is amazing, the idea that people actually do this is made all the more horrifying by watching a young girl practice until she can accomplish the monstrous feat. Moreno has both the hard look of someone who lives a difficult life and the soft look of a child who hopes for more. It is an outstanding performance, more than worthy of the Oscar nomination it received.
While Maria Full of Grace isn’t really a story about drugs, it is most definitely a story about mules. With Maria at the center, we see what some people go through to earn what seems to be a relatively small sum of money. The physical pressures of ingesting mass quantities of distinctly un-ingestible substances, the emotional toll it takes to try and maintain composure, and the hard, cold fact that nobody cares if you live or die. All of these stories play out as we watch this teenager lie and cheat for the chance to risk her life for people who would rather see her dead than lose what she carries in her belly. We feel sorry for Maria on one level and want to shake her on many others. She doesn’t do this out of desperation; she does it out of pride. She takes a foolish chance to avoid a demeaning job; only to find that there is no place for pride in this new world. She is not some princess that we want to save, she is far more real, her situation gritty and agonizing once she makes her choice.
Writer/director Joshua Marston takes a chance by letting Maria be a full character rather than an easily sympathetic victim. We need to look at her choices, acknowledge the bad ones, and recognize her for what she is – a teenager who doesn’t really understand that her remedy for a boring life is horribly vile and dangerous and has grave consequences. We also need to see past those choices and recognize that youth is not without its own risks, its feeling of immortality can be dangerous, and that actions and consequences don’t always go together.
Lastly, we need to ask ourselves what we might do in her place. Would we be so quick to turn down the chance to have a different sort of existence? Would we always recognize danger before it really grabbed us by the throat? Would we always be able to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable risk? Really, can we put ourselves in Maria’s shoes and be certain what our choice would be? This, in the end, is what makes Maria Full of Grace more than just another scary story about drug muling and turns it into something of a smack in the face to anyone who thinks they know the whole story from clickbait on the internet.
Maria Full of Grace is a challenging film. It challenges perceptions of drug mules, it challenges the idea of what desperation looks like, it challenges you to both like and be fundamentally irritated by its main protagonist. It makes a life without risk seem remarkably appealing and provides a stellar example of the dangerous risks that people take in this world every single day. On top of that, it gives us Maria: a full, rich palette of a character with which to paint every dubious choice, every questionable action, every harrowing foible. Do we like her or do we loathe her? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth the risk.
Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.
Leave a Reply