Maria Full of Grace

Maria Full of Grace (Director: Joshua Marston)

This is Marston's first feature film.

17-year-old Colombian girl Maria Alvarez (Moreno) has a terrible job at a flower plantation de-thorning flowers, has just become pregnant from her bastard boyfriend, and has a family who doesn't appreciate her, so with few options after quitting her job, is persuaded to become a drug mule, a smuggler who swallows small packets of drugs to get through airports and thereby distribute product without getting caught.

Joining her in this is her friend Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), who has also quit her plantation job to go along, and Lucy (Guilied Lopez), who has done it a couple of times before. What follows is a tense trip to the United States, where Lucy becomes ill, another passenger who is also a drug mule gets arrested at customs, and Maria gets detained--where the officials are asking the perfect trip-up questions and know in their minds she's a mule herself. Saved by the baby--customs doesn't X-ray pregnant women.

After that, there's more problems dealing with the dealers, who must wait for the girls to, um, leave their samples. Lucy is eventually killed, and Maria and Blanca escape to go find Lucy's sister who has started a life in New York. What follows becomes not a story of how a one-time drug mule got away with it and lived life happily ever after in Colombia. It's a story about an immigrant making it in the United States--the American Dream and so forth. It subtly focuses an American viewer on a lifestyle most take for granted.

Moreno is deserving of her nomination, and had the movie been a little bit bigger, might have given her some buzz going into the Oscar race. It's one of the most confident, strongest performances of the year, right up there with Hilary Swank's in Million Dollar Baby. The fact that it's her debut scores even more points. And she's cute, too. This is a good movie, well worth seeing (I missed it in theatres, had to rent it).