Film highlights the elusive nature of Christless redemption
It’s been said that life comes down to choices. But after seeing this movie, it may be more correct to say that life is about how we handle the consequences of those choices.
In Maria Full Of Grace, a teenage Colombian girl named Maria gives up her boring, dead-end job in a flower packaging plant to smuggle dope to America. She’s pregnant, and while the boy involved recognizes the need to get married, they don't love each other and Maria leaves him. Her home life is a disaster. Her entire paycheque goes to her sister—a single mother struggling to raise her boy. She has no father. No passion. No future. No hope–until a dealer offers her an all expense paid trip to New York to deliver select cargo in her stomach.
And suddenly, all of her problems can be solved with a crime load of money.
It’s almost too good to be true, and, if you factor out the risk of being jailed, the risk of a drug packet bursting and the risk of losing her family should the deal go sour, Maria has just found her dream job. The trouble is, she suffers from delusion to such an extent that it takes a horrible event to open her eyes to the world she is in.
Character in story is revealed through choice. When Maria chooses to accept the offer to become a mule we see a desperate, immature girl looking for a way out of her sentence of slavery. She feels the chains of life and is consumed with a desire to be released. And while we can’t condone it, we can forgive her for a rash decision made to get out of her mess.
She meets a fellow mule and learns the dangers. Her eyes are further opened to the truth of what she is doing. Still, she proceeds. Finally, as she is about to swallow her packets, the drug dealer gives her a chance to call it off. But again, she persists.
And here, Maria demonstrates the human problem of using intuition and logic to solve a situation instead of relying on God for deliverance. By accepting the dope, Maria breaks the law and puts herself and her child at risk. She steps further away from God in a vain attempt to solve her problems. And, as can be expected, life goes from bad to worse.
Stuck with the consequences, Maria struggles to make sense of her situation and begins her long slide downward. She’s caught and can’t get out. To keep everything afloat she has to propagate lies, proving that sin begets sin. Her spiral downward is compelling because we’re challenged to consider whether she is any better off at the end than she was at the beginning. Maria Full Of Grace is a study in the extremes to which people will go to create hope for themselves (and their children). Ultimately, Maria seems to have taken the drugs not so much to leave her old life as much as to change what she might consider a predestined, doomed future.
As an added bonus in authenticity, the movie is in Spanish with English subtitles, giving viewers an even better feel for what it is like to come from poverty in Colombia to a strange land in search of a better tomorrow.
A provocative and character-driven film (without the normal gore common to drug tales), Maria Full Of Grace is a gripping commentary on the need to escape a dead-end life and the long short-cuts people take to accomplish that goal.
Paul H. Boge is the author of The Chicago Healer and Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story.
