Maria Full of Grace
The two major themes in Maria Full of Grace are the financial struggle for families in Columbia, and the immense amount of drug dealing. The movie takes place in a small village in Colombia.
“A pregnant seventeen year old, Maria, supports her family with her salary working in floriculture. She is fired and with a total lack of perspective of finding a new job, she decides to accept the offer to work as a drug mule, flying to USA with sixty-two pellets of cocaine in her stomach. Once in New York, things do not happen as planned.” (Imdb.com) The setting for the movie started off in a poor town in Columbia and moves to a shady area of New York City. The first setting showed Maria’s life at home and how her life unfolded after she was fired and was forced to find a new means of income. The setting establishes the mood for the length of the movie. When the setting changed from Columbia to New York City, the entire underlying mood for the plot drastically changed.
The characters and their personalities are what truly made the movie believable. Maria, the main character, was very upset with her job and hated the way she was treated. Her mother, throughout the movie, made it blatantly clear that she needed a job, and the family needed the money as a result of their poor residential area. Maria discovers that she is pregnant and begins to experience the tell-tale signs of pregnancy. In one particular scene, Maria was being scolded by her boss, which showed the expression on Maria’s face was a big hint as to how much she truly detested her job.
As the movie progresses, she meets a guy who seems to be a very promising match for her. We later learned that the guy was a drug lord, who was solely interested in recruiting new minions to smuggle and sell drugs in America. Maria met a girl through her new job and who taught her how to swallow the pellets of heroine in order to mule it to the states. As a result of the storyline as well as the actors, I was able to see some of the struggles behind Hispanic culture in Columbia and their way of life.
I did not find it difficult to understand each characters personality, as I can relate to Maria in several aspects of the character and her situation. Maria needs to work in order to support her family but does not want to go back to a place that mistreats her as an employee, or as a person in general. Maria is a brave character that does what she has to do to help her family, but, in the process, puts herself into rough situations in which she has to mature fast for her age. Her ex-boyfriend was very easy to read; he is a coward and a very selfish person, especially when he hears the news about Maria’s pregnancy. Towards the end of the movie, you see a caring side of Maria when she tries to take care of her sick friend who eventually dies as a result of the drugs hidden inside her body.
Overall, this movie provided a small insight into what some people have to go through within their personal struggle to make a living for themselves and their families. I can somewhat relate to these problems as a result of the current economic situation in the United States at this point in time. It can be considerably hard for many Americans to simply make ends meet.
Overall, I think this movie had a beneficial message and was very educational, but I do not believe this would be a film that I would watch in my free time.
