I haven't seen this film, I only skimmed Marta's review, and catching up late on this thread. So what follows could be very wrong--though I doubt it.
I have my own ideas about what Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were about and these follow below. But I can be almost ninety percent certain that there is simply no way Hollywood could dramatically represent Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera with anything even close to fidelity. The worlds of Rivera and Kalo or what they evoke in me are essentially incommensurable with and completely outside the Hollywood genre, sensibility or understanding. And in fact this incommensurability is in many senses what is at the root of the profound cultural conflict and divide between Mexico and the US.
When I think about all the themes of their lives it is actually a vast joke that Hollywood would even consider depicting them. For one thing, it would be a shock to most Angelinos beyond comprehension: Mexicans are that smart? For another, how many in the US would understand the significance of the range of people Rivera and Kahlo entertained, say from Leon Trotsky to Louise Nevelson? Or how for example does the film deal with the primary themes of Rivera's painting, the communist revolutionary future of science and industry, the promise that socialism was the road to modernization and progress for Mexico, and by extension the rest of the Latin American and the third world? That all of that European modernity has to engage a dialectic with pre-existing orders of the earth and humanity in the Americas, without overwhelming them? That these themes can become a dialectic of color and shape and the juxtapositioning of styles and mannerisms, line and form, become an architectural dialogue between Le Corbusier and the builders of Tenochtitlan? Was it even noted that Juan O'Gorman built such a dialogue or dialectic and that Rivera and Kahlo live it literally as their houses?
How could Hollywood even conceive the deep conflict and the strange mating between European culture, its avantguard, science, industrialization, mass society, and that of an American feudal peasant society, still only half a step from its Spanish conquest and pre-Columbian cultures?
If Rivera completely identifies with and sees progress through socialism and science, then Frida lives out the anthropology of a modern Europeanized woman looking back into her lost roots in the peasantry and native cultures of the Americas. But she also lives it as her body first by blood then by a crippling disease, then by being broken to pieces by steel machines just as the temples and columns of Tenochtitlan, just as the cultures and peoples of the Americans were infected, broken, crushed, destroyed by the Conquistadors. Literally and figuratively fucked to death, just as Diego's science, industrialization, and modernity must continue to fuck, break and erase whatever are the descendents, residues and remnants of these peoples. All the while simultaneously curing them through science, medicine, and modernity, of what science, medicine, and modernity have wrought.
Diego is Cortez the steel giant just as Orozco painted him, the ogre, the father, the monster, the Spanish renaissance equestrian dick of modernity as some mythological god of war, and Frida is the peasantry, the corn, the mother, the child, the earth of the Americas fucked and slain by these powers. And none of these themes have the slightest meaning to anything Hollywood understands and only very remotely do a very few in most North American audiences. And even if such a melodramatic liturgy, ritual, and eroticism could have some resonance, the idea that Rivera and Kahlo understood all that, painted it, wrote it, discussed it, lived it, and invented it as mythic personae, the archetypal and historical tragedy, the legend of the Americas---that kind of artistic invention and its self-reflexive ambiguity would certainly be beyond Hollywood and its audiences in the US.
It is no accident that most other peoples on earth would probably understand such a melodrama with all its self-reflexive metaphors intact---and most in the US wouldn't, much less have any sympathy at for it. In the many evolving rounds from their legend three quarters of a century ago, it is now become the drama of Empire against Earth, what the US is doing today, now, immediately.
The next post is a clip from NYT on the restoration of Rivera and Kahlo's houses a few years ago. It touches on all the above themes and gives some idea of what I presume (and may be wrong) was missing in the movie.
Chuck Grimes