Originally released in 2002 with a $12 million budget, the R-rated film won Academy Awards for Best Original Music Score and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Based on Hayden Herrera’s book, “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo,” Julie Taymor directed “Frida” starring Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo with Alfred Molina (Diego Rivera), Geoffrey Rush (Leon Trotsky), Ashley Judd (Tina Modotti), Antonio Banderas (David Alfaro Siqueiros) and Edward Norton (Nelson Rockefeller).

Taymor conspicuously struggled with the material, as did many of the writers. The screenwriters include Clancy Sigal, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and much of the final draft was reportedly indicted by Norton. At times, the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite.

The beginning of the film is set in 1953, on the date of Frida’s only one-woman show in Mexico. Her medico tells her she is too sick to attend, but she has her bed hoisted into a flatbed truck and carried to the gallery. This aperture gesture establishes the movie’s extraordinary closing scenes in which death itself is optically discerned as another oeuvre.

Early in their marriage, Frida Kahlo tells Diego Rivera she expects him to be “not faithful, but staunch.” She holds herself to the same standard. Sexual faithfulness is a bourgeois ideal that they abstain as Marxist bohemians who disdain the conventional. But ardent jealousy is not unknown to them, and both have a double standard, sanctioning themselves freedoms they would gainsay the other. During the course of “Frida,” Kahlo has affairs with Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker (not a shabby dance card) and yet rages at Diego for his infidelities.
Biopics of artists are always arduous because the connections between life and art always seem too easy. The best ones lead us back to the work itself and inspire us to sympathize with its maker. “Frida” is jammed with incident and anecdote, and her death at 46 years-old makes longer lives seem under furnished juxtaposed by her industrious life.