Content area
Full text
Commenting on his motivations for his movie Maria Full of Grace (2004), director and writer Joshua Marston explains that he intended to make an educational movie about the people who are engaged in international drug trafficking and about the dangers that such work entails.1 His choice to depict Colombia's drug industry echoes his deep interest in world politics, Colombia's forty-year civil war and guerilla wars, and the country's stagnant economy. With Marston's advocacy of issues in world politics and human rights, HBO, the movie's US distributor, continues to add diversity to its playbill.2 Still, despite these noble intentions of promoting issues of Third World countries, the movie only partly succeeds in its attempt to "humanize the drug mule."3 This becomes evident from the general response the movie received from American viewers: while many are positively captivated by the movie, the attention of their enamored attachment to the movie almost exclusively focuses on Catalina Sandino Moreno, the young Colombian actress who plays the role of Maria. While her convincing performance certainly aided in the successful transference of the movie's intended message about the complicated entanglements that affect the lives of transnational drug mules, the ways in which many movie critics (professional and amateur) see in Moreno a representative of the Colombia she depicts is rather troublesome.
However, as this article argues, such resonance with the audience is not entirely beyond Marston's control. On the contrary, there are several instances in the movie that invite the audience to see in Moreno a spokesperson for Colombian social realities, and in Maria a " 'windowsQ' into the presumed alterity of other cultures" (Amireh and Majaj 2). One movie review makes a particularly problematic assumption about the movie when it characterizes Maria Full of Grace as a portrayal of "the enormous complexity of Hispanic life in America, especially of the illegal variety" (Brunette). Such is the general tenor in the responses Marston's movie has received from journalists and online bloggers alike.
While this essay does not endorse such reviews, it addresses a selection of such responses for its investigation of the degree to which Marston's movie itself suggests an objectified representation of Colombian female drug mules. Such representation, it seems, appears to resonate with the American audience more than the...