Movie review – Mary, full of grace
Arts EntertainmentsPrimarily filmed in Colombia, Maria Full of Grace is a dramatic film about the illegal drug industry that takes place between Colombia and the United States. The film was released in 2004 and has an approximate duration of 90 minutes. Maria, full of grace, effectively portrays the differences in lifestyle between the United States and South American countries with a much smaller GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Viewers will see the lengths people go to to get drugs through customs and earn extremely large amounts of money.
At the beginning of the film, we get a glimpse of what Maria’s daily life is like in Colombia. She works in a flower shop removing thorns from roses. Her boss tours the islands of her workers all day asking for more production and asking if her workers are meeting her quotas. Maria returns home every day to a small house with about three rooms that she shares with her mother, two sisters, and a young niece. She also has a boyfriend named Juan who does not have a very promising future and has a carefree attitude. Juan and Maria often walk through town, stopping to kiss or go up on rooftops for some privacy.
The director portrays an active nightlife in the Colombian city where María lives. She and Juan often go out drinking and dancing at various parties or clubs with Maria’s little sister, Blanca. Juan tends to drink too much and doesn’t pay much attention to Maria, leaving her looking for boys for her friends and for Maria to be flirted by other young people at parties. She seems like a young woman who is moral and wiser than most of her friends, leading the viewer to think that she and Juan won’t make it together. This is especially evident when a hip young boy named Franklin approaches her and draws her attention unlike most of the other boys. Franklin and Maria end up sharing paths, but they will meet again.
Maria and Juan are obviously very attracted to each other, and while Maria is talking to Juan in private one afternoon, she tells him that she is pregnant with his child. Juan reacts to this news in a very immature way, first getting angry and then asking Maria to marry him. He feels that it is her responsibility and that it is the right thing to do at this time. She doesn’t say yes to him because she feels that he isn’t being genuine and that he doesn’t really want to get married. She leaves and returns to her work, where a bad situation becomes much worse. Her boss keeps looking over her shoulder again, which makes her irritated and quit her job. She returns home to argue with her mother and her sisters, who accuse her of being selfish as the family is in dire need of money.
A frustrated Maria leaves home to think about a new job, passing Franklin on his motorcycle. She gets on the bike with him and they go into town together to have a drink and talk to one of her friends. It’s clear at this point that Franklin is trying to drive Maria crazy and that she is really enjoying her relaxing company. The two end up going to a seedy bar where a mobster-looking man is sitting in the corner. Franklin approaches him and manages to get the man to agree to talk to Maria for a moment. The dirty-looking man is heavily involved in the cocaine trade and offers Maria a job. She lies about her age, she says that she is eighteen when in reality she is only seventeen, and says that she will gladly work for him. The man gives her several hundred dollars to prove her word is good, and she tells Maria to meet him at a local doctor’s office in a few days. Maria is more relaxed at this point and returns home to donate some of the money to her family in need of her.
Maria Full of Grace really gets interesting when Maria arrives at the doctor’s office a few days later. She is led upstairs through a secret passageway where the doctor and the drug lord are waiting for her. The doctor asks her to swallow a lubricating liquid and a pill that will slow down her digestion process. The drug lord, whose name is Javier, asks him to swallow a total of sixty-two synthetic rubber-coated pellets filled with cocaine. She struggles as she swallows all of her pellets, but manages to get them all into her stomach and onto a plane to New York. Once in New York, she will fully digest the pellets and wash them before delivering them to drug dealers.
On the plane to New York, he sees two other drug mules he knows, a woman named Lucy and her little sister, Blanca. Blanca is only sixteen years old, but she knows that if she can make it through this trip, she has a chance to win over five thousand dollars. In a country like Colombia where people don’t have the opportunity to earn a lot of money, five thousand dollars can change one’s life. While María and Blanca have severe stomach pains during the flight, Lucy falls seriously ill. The plane lands in New York, where the girls know they need to digest the pellets quickly, especially for Lucy, who is in danger of dying because one of the pellets bursts open in her stomach.
However, Maria looks suspicious as she goes through customs at the New York airport. The police and customs agents take her to an examination room to begin questioning her in Spanish. She denies having any kind of drug in her system, but she can’t produce a believable story for the agents. Maria is forced to give a urine sample to rule out drugs in her system where the agents discover that she is pregnant. The agents really want to do a CT scan on her stomach to look for any drug-containing capsules or pellets, but they quickly rule it out because of her pregnancy. Fortunately, Maria leaves the customs office and meets up with Lucy and Blanca.
The three young women meet again in a hotel room where the drug dealers are staying. The men watch the three young women and wait patiently for them to digest the drug granules and clean them up. María and Blanca quickly get the pellets out, but Lucy is still in grave danger. Turns out a pellet burst open in her stomach where she received a lethal dose of cocaine. While she is in the bathroom, she passes out and dies under the spray of water from the shower. The youngsters send Lucy and Blanca out of the room briefly, and when they return to the room they are terrified. Lucy is gone, but there is blood all over the bathtub and a sense of death in the room.
At that moment, María and Blanca grab their cocaine pills and run out of the hotel. They find Lucy’s sister in a random apartment building and manage to stay there for several weeks. Lucy’s sister puts the two young women in contact with a local man who has a way to find work for young Latina women without much prospect of finding a job. She learns that the two women are drug mules and have large amounts of cocaine in their bags, also informing them that Lucy was in fact disemboweled and murdered at the hotel so the young men could get their drugs back.
María and Blanca are terrified and know that if they don’t do the right thing, they will be killed too. Therefore, they contact the drug dealers and deliver the cocaine granules to them. After accounting for all the pellets, the young men do the fair thing and pay the two girls the full amount of money each is owed. Feeling guilty for taking advantage of Lucy’s sister, Maria feels grateful that she is allowed to stay in the woman’s apartment, so she gives most of her money to Lucy’s sister. This money is intended to pay off her debt to the woman and, more importantly, to pay for Lucy’s funeral.
Now that María and Blanca have money to return to Colombia and have safely resolved the situation with their cocaine pills, they must return to the airport and leave New York. This time they safely clear customs and are ready to board the plane when the two young women have an argument. Blanca is still immature and she doesn’t realize that she can do better in life than being a drug mule. Maria has come to her senses after talking to Lucy’s sister and she realizes that life as a drug mule or life in Colombia really isn’t a life at all. She now knows that there are more opportunities for her in the United States and especially in New York. As Blanca boards the plane and waits for Maria to board, Maria turns away without saying a word and vows never to leave the United States. This is a very dramatic point in the movie where Maria shows that she has learned life lessons from her and now wants to have a better life for her and her baby down the road.
Maria full of grace offers a chilling account of what life is like in Colombia, especially for a drug mule. It is also clear from watching this movie that there is an extremely large amount of money involved in the illegal drug industry. Research shows that a large number of drug mules are caught at US customs and borders, but drug lords still manage to make billions of dollars each year. The profit margin on their product is so large that they can afford to lose nearly half of their product when drug mules are caught every day in the United States. María Llena tú de Gracia is not only the story of a poor family looking for better opportunities as drug mules; it is an accurate account of the lengths people will go through to make money in poor areas. While many people make huge amounts of money producing and dealing drugs in countries like Colombia, it is still illegal and extremely punishable in the United States. The risks are great and include imprisonment for life or death. Due to the simple plot and the drama involved in the film, Mary Full of Grace has a rating of 3.5 out of 5.