Review: 'Maria's' Grace -- Heartbreaking Honesty

'Maria, Full Of Grace' (R) (out of four)

There is something tragic and ironic about the title "Maria, Full of Grace," suggesting that Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a complete and dignified woman when in fact she is a shell of a human being adrift in a humiliating nightmare.

Then again, maybe that's the point: Her grace emerges slowly through her inner strength and courage, not only in coping with the bleak deck of cards that life has dealt her but in her willingness to ante up and risk anything to rise above the status quo.

She works all day in a flower factory, de-thorning roses at a rapid pace to meet quotas, and her purpose in life seems limited to supporting her family, keeping her job, and trying to attract boys. It is a heartbreaking situation with hope in short supply, and writer and director Joshua Marston is careful to never once exaggerate the story, allowing the conversations and situations to speak for themselves.

In two noteworthy scenes, we realize just how limited the horizons of Maria's world are. The first takes place in the cafeteria during a work break when Maria’s friend Lucy (Giulied Lopez) flirts with a boy across the room, forgetting all of her worries and despair thanks to the attention of the opposite sex.

The second is a counterpoint to this giddy moment, exposing how meaningless these distractions really are. Maria discovers she's pregnant while involved with a boy she does not really care about and who does not care for her, and in a moment of raw honesty they discuss their situation and the notion of marriage as the next logical step. Maria can't believe that he would marry someone he doesn't love, but in this part of the world, with their lack of education, hope, or motivation, it's literally the only course of life available to them.

This lengthy setup is essential to the remainder of the film, and Marston’s patience in presenting Maria's view of the world pays off with a story that is more realistic and haunting than most movies about drugs or the drug trade.

Consider when she is offered a job as a mule -- a drug trafficker who risks her life by swallowing the product in order to get it past security. In most movies such risks would be absurd, yet here we understand and empathize with her decision to go through with it, and are that much more involved with the scenes of Maria filling her stomach with the illegal goods, her horrific plane flight to America and her misery and disorientation as she is met at the airport by American police and then American drug dealers.

"Maria, Full of Grace" is a cold, realistic chronicling of what it takes for people like this to escape the hell to which they have been confined, and how a sweet and innocent girl would ever get mixed up in this dangerous profession. It is free of the melodrama or excess that has ruined similar mainstream works, films such as "Leaving Las Vegas," which is powerful but almost overdone, and "Requiem For A Dream," which is affecting, but extremely stylized.

In "Maria, Full of Grace," the real horror does not involve the pain of naive drug use, but the more horrific notion of a reasonable and sane person deciding that her only way out is to repeatedly risk her life. Initially told she would have to swallow only a few packets of controlled substances, Maria is forced into swallowing more than 60 small pellets, and each one of these represents a lethal time bomb that, if punctured or faulty, will kill her upon leaking.

It is Marston's restrained storytelling, and Moreno's reserved performance, that really make this work. Moreno finds in her character a balance between despair and determination, between hopelessness and vigilance, which is wholly plausible and moving. So many actors would have overplayed or underplayed, but here Moreno is believable as a woman who knows she can't lash out, but also refuses with all her being to accept things as they are.

Her grace is in her stoicism -- that she can see her existence for what it is, calculate the odds, and take the risk of a lifetime. She is not to be revered or pitied, but simply appreciated for what she is: a woman willing to risk death, 60 times over, to survive.