MOVIE REVIEW Drug mules' plight is focus of 'Maria'

The movie is about desperate choices.
By CHRIS VOGNAR
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
We've seen tales of the drug trade from the addict's perspective, from the law enforcement perspective, and from a panoramic perspective (in "Traffic"). But "Maria Full of Grace" introduces us to a new kind of movie character.
Maria is a mule, a 17-year-old Colombian woman with a dead-end life who swallows pellets filled with heroin and smuggles them into the United States. It's a potentially lethal and highly illegal job, and "Maria," starring the revelatory Catalina Sandino Moreno, looks at it coolly and dispassionately, with a sympathetic eye toward the entry-level end of a nasty business.
Her life
This mule is appropriately headstrong. She's also sick of her life. She lives with her big family, she's recently pregnant by her ambitionless boyfriend and she needs cash after leaving her abusive boss and her job stripping thorns from roses. Even in these early background scenes, you can tell that Moreno, making her film debut, has a certain something. You could describe it as an ever-present comfort and quiet confidence before the camera that speaks of life experience. But she's more fun to watch than to describe.
Shot through with saturated colors and penetrating hand-held close-ups, "Maria" is a tense, immediate, no-frills drama about desperate choices made under desperate circumstances, and the consequences of those choices. We feel the tension more than ever on the commercial flight from Colombia to New York, which Maria shares with two other mules: an older woman (Guilied Lopez) who seems to be falling ill and a copy-cat peer (Yenny Paola Vega) with whom Maria is saddled once the plane lands and the girls make another risky choice.
Focuses on mules
"Maria" focuses on the mules, but it also has some of the all-seeing quality that got Steven Soderbergh a best-director Oscar for 2000's "Traffic." Once the plane lands, the girls get grilled by no-nonsense customs officers who know how to do their job without abusing it. After that, it's on to the middlemen, unscrupulous young men barely older than Maria and her friend. Then we meet Don Fernando, an avuncular, all-purpose Colombian immigrant helper whose duties include arranging for the remains of deceased mules to be shipped back home. (He is played by Orlando Tobon -- known in New York as "mayor of Little Colombia" -- who is the real-life basis for the character).
"Maria Full of Grace" is not full of hope. The sense of sadness grows stronger as the film progresses, and Maria's point of view expands to incorporate the larger world she has entered. But a film needn't be happy to be great. This is a lean, deftly told story that stays energetic even as hopelessness accrues. And it never loses sight of its protagonist's humanity, tested but not defeated by a thankless and inhumane task. Maria may be a mule, but she's never less than a person.