Word: taymor
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...chipper biopics in which the heroine (Salma Hayek) cheerfully endures her suffering while incidentally creating her art and carrying on her endlessly tormented love affair with the muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). The result is a trivializing movie, especially disappointing because it was directed by Broadway's lionized Julie Taymor (The Lion King). Her first theatrical film, Titus, was distinguished by a bold and visionary sweep. In Frida that inventiveness has diminished to a kind of strained cuteness. Everything that makes an artist an artist--the obsessions, the egotism--is ignored in favor of upbeat movie conventions. --By Richard Schickel...
...extraordinarily interesting life are shown in painstaking detail, from her misadventures as a young and idealistic student to her much-famed visit to New York for Rivera’s commission from Nelson Rockefeller. Most of the time, however, these details fly by with little investment, as Taymor attempts grandeur but ends up with only a bulging detachment...
...annoying distraction. The other, more problematic, is Geoffrey Rush’s turn as Leon Trotsky, who for a time was a lover of Kahlo’s. More time is devoted to his role than Norton’s, surely, but it’s intensely painful seeing Taymor attempting to inflate his appearance by forcing us to watch Trotsky and Kahlo staring at a beautiful Mexican vista, all while listening to Trotsky wax corny Hollywood philosophical, with uplifting music ready to murmur...
...boring displays of ho-hum period cinematography and horrendously contrived narrative set-ups that bore more than they evoke. Early in the film, the trolley crash that renders Kahlo periodically unable to walk is shot and edited with a shocking visceral quality and a brash artistic confidence. Immediately after, Taymor gives us a shamelessly trippy, grotesque animated sequence that quite unsubtly suggests that the remainder of the film will explore the lines between Kahlo’s life and her astounding surrealistic...
What actually follows, unfortunately, is another 90 minutes of derivative dramatic conundrum. Kahlo’s art, which is considerably more passionate than this film is willing to realize, imitated her life in more interesting ways than Taymor shows us. When the paintings are shown on screen, only the most manipulated audience member would not want to be transported to some far-off gallery, where perhaps we can enter the world of Frida Kahlo without the distracting influence of dramatic contrivance...