{"id":2910,"date":"2005-04-01T14:46:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T14:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/steyn-on-maria-full-of-grace\/"},"modified":"2005-04-01T14:46:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T14:46:00","slug":"steyn-on-maria-full-of-grace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/steyn-on-maria-full-of-grace.html","title":{"rendered":"Steyn on Maria Full of Grace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Mark Steyn<\/a> has some interesting comments on <\/span>Maria Full of Grace<\/a><\/i> on his website:<\/span><\/p>\n

The publicity poster for Maria Full of Grace<\/i> shows the face of the eponymous Maria looking up at a hand that\u2019s proffering her mouth a vaguely Communion-like pellet. The sacramental imagery, plus the movie title, plus the character\u2019s name, plus the fact that she\u2019s carrying an unborn baby, and that she works at a rose plantation removing thorns, may lead the casual movie-goer to assume he\u2019s in for a religious allegory. . . .<\/p>\n

Maria Alvarez is played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, the sort of bright-eyed natural teen beauty every gritty indie slice-of-life needs. You\u2019re portraying grinding poverty with dodgy fast-tracks to seedy underworlds \u2014 the more typical Colombian country gal in the midst of all that might start off with a more pronounced moustache and wind up quickly with the dead-eyed, pock-marked, hardened-beyond-her-years look of so many bit-players in the drug business. So, if you\u2019re trying to communicate the idea of spiritual goodness at the heart of a sordid world, the luminous Miss Moreno is just perfect. She made quite a splash at all the hip film festivals, and she deserves the career bump she got, because she\u2019s about 85 per cent of the movie. . . .<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a feisty, determined, likable kid, but the religious allegory thing never quite lifts off. The Sixties auteurs who started the mini-genre of finding sacred metaphors among the contemporary world\u2019s scuzzy and downtrodden were for the most part conventionally raised Catholics working off the burthens of their childhoods. Marston, by contrast, appears to have no real feeling for the spiritual, but is just seeking a little high-toned gloss for a sweet fable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FWIW, I have never been all that sure just what to make of this film. It did eventually sneak into <\/span>my top ten<\/a> for last year, largely on the strength of its performances and the seemingly realistic, even mundane, way it shows the various people involved in the drug trade. But the spiritual title made little sense to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I did notice how the film repeatedly drew our attention to the things <\/span>inside<\/i> Maria\u2019s body, to the things she is \u201cfull of\u201d \u2014 the food she buys, the baby she\u2019s carrying, the drugs she smuggles, etc. \u2014 and I might have even laughed out loud during the film\u2019s final shot, in which a mural on a wall in the background declares, rather tritely, \u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s inside that counts.\u201d (I know some people missed that bit, but that <\/span>can\u2019t<\/i> have been an accident.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But what spirituality <\/span>is<\/i> there in this film? As I wrote in my notes after seeing the film last July, \u201cWe see Maria praying in a church at one point \u2014 just another part of that opening half-hour that gives us a slice of typical Colombian life \u2014 and when the drug dealers in the United States watch TV, we can tell that there\u2019s some discussion going on regarding some sort of alleged miracle (the word \u2018Catholic\u2019 comes up a lot), but there\u2019s no real explicit or even implicit religious content in this film, apart from all that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Steyn\u2019s point about the \u201cmini-genre\u201d created by those \u201cSixties auteurs\u201d is an interesting one, since we still see evidence of that in more recent films, the most obvious example being <\/span>Bruno Dumont\u2019s<\/a> <\/span>La Vie de Jesus<\/a><\/i>. But, like Steyn, I\u2019m not sure <\/span>Maria<\/i> really earns its title, even on those terms.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn has some interesting comments on Maria Full of Grace on his website: The publicity poster for Maria Full of Grace shows the face of the eponymous Maria looking up at a hand that\u2019s proffering her mouth a vaguely Communion-like pellet. The sacramental imagery, plus the movie title, plus the character\u2019s name, plus the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSteyn on Maria Full of Grace<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mark Steyn has some interesting comments on Maria Full of Grace on his website:The publicity poster for Maria Full of Grace shows the face of the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/steyn-on-maria-full-of-grace.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Steyn on Maria Full of Grace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mark Steyn has some interesting comments on Maria Full of Grace on his website:The publicity poster for Maria Full of Grace shows the face of the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2005\/04\/steyn-on-maria-full-of-grace.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-04-01T14:46:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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