Trotsky Lives!

So, too, the real subject of “Frida” is not Kahlo as she actually was, but Kahlo as she has become since her death: a global feminist icon. Indeed, one could imagine no more severe indictment of contemporary feminism than the real Kahlo. This woman artist clearly followed the path of her life with complete freedom, yet returned again and again to a male lover, the painter Diego Rivera, who, with some justice, is equated here with King Kong. (Actor Alfred Molina is not as fat as the real Rivera, but, padded up, portrays him credibly.)

But the actual life of Kahlo has been set aside, for what “Frida” is mostly about is the need of the American Left for a passionate myth of the radical past. To find a parallel, you have to go back to Warren Beatty’s fictionalization of John Reed’s life in “Reds.” Just as one could not imagine the Russians making a picture like “Reds” back in 1981, so one cannot imagine a Mexican film about Kahlo looking or sounding anything like this work–and it has been universally panned by Mexicans.

But neither can one imagine such a film being made about any other idol of the American Left. Any takers on an image of Woody Guthrie making love to Salma Hayek, as Leon Trotsky (played by Geoffrey Rush) does in “Frida”? The historical memory of revolutionary Mexico and of the bohemian radicals of the 1930s, from New York to Paris and back, combines conveniently with the tortured biography of the unibrowed heroine to give lefties an epic of their own, at a time in which their ideology, inspiration, enthusiasm, and equilibrium have become exhausted or disoriented.

The cult of Frida Kahlo has ballooned in the past two decades in ways that few could have imagined at the time of her death a half century ago. The surrealist poet and critic André Breton, who did much more than anyone else to establish her reputation, gets short shrift in this film. But Breton was right when, the artist still in her thirties, he deemed Kahlo a more important painter than Rivera–for Rivera’s sort of socialist mural painting has disappeared from most of the globe (except in places known for reactionary tastes, like San Francisco, Belfast, and southern Lebanon).

In the past twenty years, Kahlo’s work has appeared on everything from cocktail napkins to baseball caps. It’s not so much that her paintings are actually in vogue, but that Frida Kahlo had it all in terms of politically-correct victimization: She was a half-Jewish, Hispanic, leftist, bisexual, female artist, who suffered a crippling accident, was oppressed by a phallocratic husband, and made love to a Russian exile. What more could one ask of a culture heroine today?

On the screen, “Frida” submerges historical detail under nostalgia for the heroic Left of generations past. The screenwriting credit to novelist Clancy Sigal is notable: Sigal’s 1962 classic “Going Away” was a high-pitched, sentimental lament for the old Commies who had been betrayed by history and left in the dust by consumerist America. (Unfortunately, a lot of people who read and loved Sigal’s book were, in turn, betrayed by history–but many of them make do with the consolation of academic tenure, consumerist America’s most exalted reward.)

Yet notwithstanding the concessions to faddism–including amateurish and pretentious special effects and a gratuitous lesbian sex scene bringing Kahlo together with a look-alike of American jazz singer Josephine Baker–“Frida” remains worth seeing. The story is presented graphically and vividly, reinforcing its essential connection with the Mexican physical and intellectual environment. In a back-street cantina, Diego Rivera pulls a gun on his rival, the Communist hack David Alfaro Siqueiros (well acted by Antonio Banderas), but he hurls only curses at Nelson Rockefeller, who in 1933 commissioned the famous Rockefeller Center mural and then turned it down the following year.

Rockefeller is played by the weedy Edward Norton, which seems almost as poor a casting choice as the pale Ashley Judd, who plays the photographer and Soviet secret police assassin Tina Modotti as an airhead. Norton seems to have chosen the Rockefeller role with a similarly obscure sense of irony. (Norton, who is Hayek’s real-life boyfriend, helped rewrite the script.) The chronology of events and production of paintings is fudged in this film. A Communist demonstration in Mexico City in the mid-1920s, at a time when such turbulent efforts often ended in street fighting, is presented like a teach-in at a midwestern American college, and the slogan “The people united will never be defeated” is chanted, although it only became popular in Allende’s Chile of the 1970s. Similarly, a priest is shown in his vestments at the funeral of Frida’s mother, at a time when the Catholic church functioned underground in revolutionary Mexico, and clerical dress could not be worn in public.

In a real gaffe, the film fails to convey the considerable size and effect of Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural. The controversy over these frescoes has entered the history of modern art. Nelson Rockefeller had commissioned Rivera and two other painters, the Mexican José Clemente Orozco and the Spaniard José Maria Sert, to decorate the new building with large panels. Rivera designed a massive tableau with a human “controller” at its center, and a nearby representation of a second man joining hands with humanity. Rivera provided various ambiguous answers when asked if the second figure would be a portrait of a specific person, but it was, in fact, a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, architect of Soviet communism.

Unfortunately, in this film, Lenin’s place in the mural is presented as if it were an incidental image. This makes Rivera seem more innocent, and Rockefeller more destructive. The painter had set his mind on a serious artistic and political provocation, and Rockefeller’s reaction was entirely predictable. (It was, after all, his wall, as Norton points out here.) From “Frida” one would erroneously conclude that the mural was utterly lost when it was removed from Rockefeller Center. Actually, it was repainted by Rivera, Lenin and all, in Mexico City.

A PERSONAL BREAK between Trotsky and Rivera, inevitable considering the two men’s egos, is also presented inaccurately in “Frida,” as though it were caused primarily by sexual rivalry over Kahlo. Above all, the film omits the most significant moral incident in Frida Kahlo’s biography: After Trotsky’s assassination, she and Rivera stridently rejoined the Stalinists. Her museum in Mexico City displays one of the last of her obscene works: an unfinished portrait of Stalin.

But history has sided with Trotsky, more than with Stalin–a fact of which this film is itself dramatic proof. Trotsky: The name remains challenging a half century after his assassination. Few former adherents of the man ever fully gave up their attachment to him. Saul Bellow was in Mexico City at the time of Trotsky’s murder and memorably records in “The Adventures of Augie March” “the instant impression he gave . . . of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms, . . . an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things.”

But Trotskyism without Trotsky, as a political movement, was nothing. Most of his better followers, beginning with James Burnham, became interventionist partisans of capitalist democracy against Stalinist dictatorship. Jean van Heijenoort, Trotsky’s secretary and revealer to the world of the Trotsky-Kahlo love affair, ended up a supporter of Ronald Reagan and the Nicaraguan contras. In the generation after the neoconservatives, the most active converts from the radical Left were former acolytes of Trotsky, though they never knew him in life. Among Americans who remained faithful to Trotsky’s socialism, the only one of distinction was Irving Howe (whose relationship to Trotsky resembles that of the Soviet cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov to Stalin).

Breton and the Parisian surrealists called their movement “the communism of genius.” Take the socialism out of Trotsky’s life, and only genius remains. What did we inherit from Trotsky, and what is the essential aspect of this man that made it possible for him to be the subject of a romantic, even erotic film, decades after his death? Once, long ago in the socialist movement, there was a concept called “swimming against the stream.” But it faded out after the coming of Soviet communism. In a sense, Trotsky was the last to swim against the stream, when he denounced Stalinism, the Russian purges, and the other crimes of the dictatorship he had helped create.

TODAY’S LEFT, including its pathetic bands of so-called Trotskyists, know nothing of swimming against the stream; they can only float in the swamp. The Pakistani Trotskyist Tariq Ali sees no shame in comparing Osama bin Laden to Trotsky, favorably of course; the rest of the rabble chase after Milosevic, Castro, and Saddam. Trotsky’s legacy is summarized in “Frida” when he describes himself as “alone and without friends against the world’s biggest killing machine.” Perhaps the best scene in this film comes when Trotsky and Frida, the old man and the cripple, climb to the top of the great pyramid at Teotihuacan, surrounded by the unmatchable Mexican sky and the treasures of the country’s ancient culture. In the new world, in the Americas, free of Europe’s illnesses and horrors, Trotsky avers that he feels alive for the first time in many years.

“Frida” is a good film, if only because it proves wrong another statement of Bellow’s about Trotsky: “Out in Russia was his enemy. . . . He’d kill him. Death discredits. Survival is the whole process. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn’t any memory. The power that’s established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.” Many may see the parables of Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky as having to do with personal survival. Others, however, will perceive something more–something having to do with the voices of the dead that have not gone away. Today we can barely make them out.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.