MOVIE REVIEW : The Outrageous ‘Rivera’

There ought to be a good film in the life of Diego Rivera. He was one of those over-life-size artists who erupted from the soil of modernism. His voracious ego and appetite matched Picasso’s even if his talent did not.

Because of his penchant for igniting scandal, Rivera was one of the most popular and notorious of the revolutionary Mexican muralists, but his reputation fell into the shadows after his death in 1957. His style, like that of Thomas Hart Benton, was stigmatized as a throwback. His communism did not play well in McCarthy’s America.

Today the climate has reversed. Communism appears on the brink of quaintness. Art has re-engaged politics and feminism discovered the quirky genius of Rivera’s third wife, Frida Kahlo. Their story, not unlike that of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, crackles with infidelity (mainly his), obsessive love and masochistic self-sacrifice (mainly hers).

It’s the stuff of contemporary historical drama so you’d think an enterprising documentary filmmaker could make something of it. Mary Lance and Eric Breitbart have tried in the hourlong “Diego Rivera: I Paint What I See” (through Tuesday at the Nuart). Artniks will attend because it is the first film profile of the artist. Everybody else might want to wait until it turns up on television--it has that sort of scale.

Rivera was an an outrageous embroiderer of his own legend. Perhaps that’s why the filmmakers took such an over-corrective, flat-fact approach to the story. There’s a lot of wonderful vintage footage of Rivera and Kahlo, of Cubist Paris and revolutionary Mexico. We see the obese, pop-eyed artist at work on the Rockefeller Center mural that would be destroyed for including a portrait of Lenin, as well as the Detroit mural that was saved by a member of the capitalist Ford family.

There’s a real historical charge in seeing Leon Trotsky as Rivera’s house guest in Mexico and real poignancy in watching the tiny, crippled Kahlo paint. She said she did not regard herself as an artist but only worked to have something to do while Diego was busy with his brush and his bimbos.

Maybe Lance and Breitbart were trying for the kind of laconic tension that “Frontline” gets with its monosyllabic voiceover. Maybe they were intimidated into excessive conventionality by their monstrous, fascinating subject. Funny, a recent feature film on Kahlo called “Frida” captured all the fetid hedonistic poetry of their intimate lives but lost the facts in a sea of surrealism. Maybe a nice double bill would provide us and opportunity to blend them in the Mix Master of the mind.