FILM REVIEW; A Celebrated Artist's Biography, on the Verge of Being a Musical
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 25, 2002
The movie biography, a tricky genre to begin with, is never more so than when the subject is an artist. The lives of creative people are sometimes dramatic, but they rarely make satisfying drama, and even well-made, well-acted biopics tend to be dutiful, decorous and lifeless. The psychology of inspiration and the tedium of artistic labor seem to elude the conventions of filmmaking, so that our desire to glimpse the inner workings of genius is teased and thwarted. Instead, we are usually treated to the superficial pageantry of the artist's career -- sex and politics, drinking and fighting, celebrity and ruin.
Occasionally, a movie comes along that transcends these limitations. Julian Schnabel's ''Before Night Falls,'' a passionate exploration of the life of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, was one. ''Frida,'' Julie Taymor's teeming, color-soaked portrait of the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, comes tantalizingly close to being another.
Ms. Taymor's film, adapted by no fewer than four screenwriters from Hayden Herrera's biography, is as restless and determined as its subject, whose painful, promiscuous life has become, almost 50 years after her death, something of a pop-culture legend. But while Kahlo, at least in the account favored by Ms. Herrera and Ms. Taymor, refused to be constrained by her sex, social convention or disability, ''Frida'' is corseted by the norms of high-toned, responsible filmmaking, ticking off important events in Kahlo's life without much insight or feeling.
But when the movie manages to break free -- in bursts of color, imagination, music, sex and over-the-top theatricality -- it honors the artist's brave, anarchic spirit.
Early in the movie, young Frida (Salma Hayek) shows up for her sister's wedding portrait dressed in a man's gray flannel suit, sending up propriety to the delight of her father (Roger Rees) and the chagrin of her mother (Patricia Reyes Spindola). Too often, ''Frida'' squeezes its carnal spirit into respectable clothes, enacting the artistic compromise that is one of its themes. It's a staid film biography that wants most desperately to be a musical -- to bracket its subject's name between gratuitous exclamation points. (The most moving, most memorable scenes are in essence musical numbers, including a torrid tango danced by Ms. Hayek and Ashley Judd that is reason enough to see the movie.)
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