Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a seventeen year-old Columbian girl who works in a factory stripping thorns and leaves from long stem roses being packaged for florist shops. When she raises her hand one day and tells her boss that she needs to go to the bathroom once again—morning sickness—he refuses her request. When she vomits on her work he forces her to rinse the roses off and return then to the assembly line. Every evening Maria returns to a cramped home where she is expected to play the role of dutiful daughter and granddaughter, picking up the financial slack for her sister, who has an infant of her own and cannot work. And when she tells her boyfriend of her pregnancy he offers to do the right thing and marry her. But when she asks him if he loves her he scoffs at the idea. This is a boy who won’t even dance with her.

So, Maria decides she needs to make some changes in her life. She quits her job, tells her boyfriend to go to hell, makes excuses to her family and then hitches a ride with an acquaintance to Bogotá to look for work. But with virtually no skills Maria has few job prospects to choose from. So she takes a suggestion from her traveling companion and meets a kingpin in the drug trade.

It is here that director/writer Joshua Marston introduces us to the frightening and smarmy world of the drug mule: people, frequently young women, who willingly swallow a stomach full of deadly cocaine then fly off to America where they will be received by even scarier people who will shutter them up and give them laxatives and wait for them to pass their cargo. It’s easily the most dangerous role in the drug trade. The Columbian farmers have the rebel group FARC to protect them. The drug kingpins protect themselves with their own guns and corrupt politicians. All that Maria has to protect her are two thin condom layers covering compressed cocaine that will kill her if any one of the sixty-odd capsules of coke comes apart in her digestive tract. And if anything goes wrong, or turns up missing in shipment from Columbia to America, then it will be her family who will pay the consequences. And things, of course, do go wrong.

This is not a film about drug abuse, which is an entirely different genre. Instead, “Maria Full of Grace” is a film that deals with the intimate role that one young woman plays in the dangerous journey that drugs make before they are sold on the streets of America. This is a quiet yet stunning drug film that could easily be mentioned in the same breath as such classics as Alan Parker’s “Midnight Express,” and William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” Though it may lack spectacular car chases or horrible scenes of prison abuse—who needs that these days—that make the other films so memorable, this film is perhaps unique in depicting the quiet terrors of individuals who have chosen, for whatever reason, to work in this terrible trade.

Marston’s stark direction reinforces for us the harsh realities that await Maria as she ventures out into the wider world with her deadly cargo. But he balances this with a few rare moments when the camera softens and shows us an entirely different Maria; as a lovely and ambitious young woman who is only trying to better herself in the quickest way possible.

For her part, Ms. Moreno beautifully plays her Maria as an unsmiling and surly girl whose willfulness and spunk serve her well when events get a little sticky. On the lam in a strange country, she is forced to think on her feet: especially when her hometown friend Blanca (Yenny Paolo Vega) endangers them by tagging along on their delivery run, then flashing her own stash of smuggled dope at the most inappropriate time. Maria is forced to ingratiate herself upon the kindness and hospitality of strangers, relatives of a sister mule who have no idea what their girl has been doing to support herself. Wide-eyed and worldly, even for girl who has actually seen very little of the real world, Maria keep a cool head as danger swirls around her; steeling herself at just the right moments and allowing herself a fleeting instance of happiness—and a smile—when she is acquainted with the child growing within her.

The title of this film carries enough symbolism for any level of viewer to interpret their own individual meaning. I like to think of it as representing something more than just a vulgar metaphor of a poor, third-world girl risking her life to deliver dope to a rich, indulgent and slothful nation in hopes of improving her drab life. The grace that fills Maria is that hope of a better life for herself and her unborn child. It is a hope that scant few real drug mules would ever live long enough to realize.


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age