Frida

Starring:Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera.  With Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Judd, Edward Norton and Antonio Banderas

Directed by Julie Taymore

Rated R (sex/nudity/language)

118 minutes run time

Seldom-seen Salma Hayek in a riveting performance as the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in the political turmoil of 1930s Mexico and America.  Frida describes her life as having two great misfortunes, the first, a lorry accident in her youth that left her a cripple for life, and the second, her marriage to the polemic artist Diego Rivera.  The first quarter of the movie is devoted to the accident and the rest to Frida’s and Rivera’s mutual torture in the cause of art and liberation. 

Alfred Molina presents a solid Rivera, who paints his politics with passion and devotion but can’t fathom a dedicated relationship.  Molina’s part is less screaming and ranting and more shoulder-shrugging and boyish emotional blankness, stumbling through a life of broken marriages and hardly consummated love affairs.  By the way, what’s the attraction here?  His art was great in a time of greatness (Trotsky stayed at his place during hard times with Stalin), but, after all, he was no Brad Pitt.

The movie touches Rivera’s art, but thoroughly explores Frida’s, as it should, complete with animated special effects showing her presumed visions integrated with the pain and tragedy of her existence; her permanently deformed skeleton forming the cartoons for the crepuscular images of death she created on canvas.  The background vocals in this movie are rarely in the background and amplify the impact of the visual art to a breathtaking intensity.

“Frida” brings to mind the “Pollock” production (2002) starring (and directed by) Ed Harris as the tortured abstract painter.  Harris’ Pollock drank and smoked about as much as Frida and Diego, but Salma Hayak’s portrayal of Frida’s hell on earth makes Harris’ Greenwich Village hanky-panky look like TV’s “Friends.”

Complete with Ed Norton as a terrific young Nelson Rockefeller who pays for, then destroys, Rivera’s inaugural American work for its inclusion of Lenin among the masses.