Frida

Starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina and Geoffrey Rush

Directed by…

Frida

Starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina and Geoffrey Rush

Directed by Julie Taymor

Should a film about an artist tell the story of his or her life or should it try instead to capture the essence of the artist’s work? Sometimes it can be difficult to reconcile these two things in the limited framework of a feature film. “Frida,” the sophomore full-length effort of budding auteur Julie Taymor tries, but ultimately fails.

Especially with a subject like the artist Frida Kahlo, a stoic in real life, whose paintings rank among the most disturbing expressions of pain ever created, the combination of storytelling and capturing the essence of the art is a lofty goal.

Taymor’s approach is to tell the tale of Kahlo’s (Salma Hayek) life in a conventional way. There are, in fact, some moments that are downright Lifetime Movie Of The Week, for instance when she walks again after being supposedly paralyzed for life or her fateful first meetings with her future husband, muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina).

I can only assume that this is to make her story more accessible, and to provide a counterpoint to the film’s other facet, the surreal montage sequences which accent particularly important moments in her life. These scenes, however, do such a good job of expressing the feel of her work without explicitly copying it, that they really just draw attention to how bland and unoriginal the script is.

That said, though, the film is at times nearly brilliant. There is a dance between Hayek and Ashley Judd that ranks among the most erotic moments of this year’s films. The photography, for the duration of the movie, is fantastic. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (“8 Mile”) captures perfectly the warmth of Mexico, the coldness of New York and the sterility of Paris as Kahlo felt it.

As Rivera, Alfred Molina is nearly perfect. The supporting cast likewise is wonderful, with especially good performances turned in by Geoffrey Rush as Leon Trotsky and Edward Norton as John D. Rockefeller Jr. In fact the only weak performance is Hayek’s. She sometimes seems as if she is just biding her time between quotes. She’s not distractingly bad, though, and it is a challenging role.

Ultimately, “Frida” is ambitious and entertaining, but it doesn’t quite work. It is certainly better than average, and it will likely make a splash at Oscar time, but the twin aspects of the film, Frida Kahlo as an artist and Frida Kahlo as a person, just don’t work well with each other. Perhaps Taymor should have set her sights a little lower and concentrated on one or the other.