By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, Nov. 1, 2002, at 1:43 PM ET

For Frida (Miramax), her new biographical movie about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the director Julie Taymor has a thrilling visual idea and a crippling visual idea. It's the same idea: to treat Frida as a figure in a Frida Kahlo painting. Thanks to some of the most exquisite special effects you'll ever see, flat paintings suddenly acquire three dimensions, and three-dimensional people freeze and become part of a larger canvas.

If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you. Taymor has taken a leap as a filmmaker from her first feature, Titus (1999), which was sensational but stylistically all over the map (with acting to match). Frida is more fluid and confident. If you want to know why Frida Kahlo is more than a painter—she's an icon, a mass-culture phenomenon, a cottage industry—look no further: Taymor prints the legend. After the bus crash that nearly ended the young Kahlo's life, Taymor serves up a sacred/ghastly image of the young woman (played by Salma Hayek) splayed out, impaled, covered in bright red blood and gold (meant for a cathedral ceiling). Frida wakes to a chilling Day of the Dead skeleton show of doctors and nurses, animated by the great film surrealists the Brothers Quay. Her wedding ceremony to the muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) is just as Kahlo painted it, and when she's stricken over the breakup of their marriage (after she has caught Rivera having sex with her sister), the image is from her Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair. Again and again the seminal events in Frida's life are seen through the prism of her artistry.

Kahlo herself made it difficult to separate them. Although she's grouped with the Surrealists—Dalí, Magritte, Miró, Picasso—she wasn't happy with that label. "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't," she once said. "I never painted dreams. I painted my reality." That's a little dodgy. All Surrealists—all Expressionists, even a few Cubists, for that matter—use extreme stylization to portray the world as they think it really is, not as it appears. But Kahlo had broken with the Surrealists for political reasons, and she was eager to claim her Self as the core of her aesthetic. (No wonder people like Madonna spend millions to own her paintings.)

What's wrong with that? Only that life and art are not the same, and making them bleed so thoroughly into each other—as Taymor does—has a way of trivializing the artistic process. Kahlo was enormously canny and resourceful in taking traditional folk art and miracle paintings known as retablos and transforming them into mythic visions of her own physical pain and emotional dislocation. Here, those visions seem to leap fully formed from her imagination. When she appears in wildly colorful Mexican garb, with heavy necklaces, with her braids wrapped around her head like a helmet, with her mustache slightly highlighted and eyebrows defiantly conjoined, it's as if she was born that way. In Frida, we're given no insight into the most astounding creation of Kahlo's life: Frida Kahlo, feminist icon.

Salma Hayek has such a lithe and wriggly little body and is so revved up and raring to go that she doesn't convey much of the ugly physical paralysis of Frida's life; and there's something twittery about her voice that reminds me of Penélope Cruz. But she's likably game. Even better is Molina, who brings a lightness to the fat Rivera; Molina creates a figure of titanic irresponsibility, a creature of impulse with no obligation to reconcile his political, personal, and aesthetic ideals. But the movie grows ever more sketchy and diffuse—symptoms of most Hollywood biopics, which tend to skip lightly along the surface of their subject's lives. There were reportedly pressures from the studio, Miramax, to put the emphasis on flashy spectacle; and certainly one reason that the movie runs out of narrative steam is that it strives to put a life-affirming spin on the material. The last act of Kahlo's life was marked by drug addiction, a decline in artistic power, and a desperate embrace of Stalin. But Frida is never allowed to bog down—or to show how fiercely difficult it was for Kahlo to bridge the distance between her personal agony and her art. By the standards of most biopics, Taymor creates a remarkable canvas. But it's all surface.