Griselda

 The Netflix series, Griselda (2024) relies upon a gimmick perfected by Roger Corman, the King of B's.  Corman remade successful Hollywood pictures with a low budget, substituting female cast members for the roles played by men.  For instance, Arena was a gladiator movie imitating Spartacus but cast with bosomy female warriors.  Grselda follows this pattern:  it's more or less a mix of Brian DePalma's Scarface and Coppola's The Godfather featuring women with large breasts as protagonists.  In 1970's Miami, a ruthless ex-prostitute claws her way to the top of the cocaine business, rules with an iron fist over her drug-dealing empire, and, then, is destroyed by her own hubris.  Sofia Vergera, a Latin bombshell with a sitcom pedigree (she's originally from Columbia) produced the six-episode mini-series and plays the starring role of Griselda Blanco, the drug kingpin.  For about three episodes, the show is compelling but, then, collapses into the cliches typical of the genre and the show's narrative arc feels not only predictable, but formulaic.  Shows of this sort are well-produced and have snappy dialogue and impressive locations and photography -- but there's less here than meets the eye.

Griselda Blanco is a prostitute and low-grade drug dealer in Medellin.  Some drug deals go bad and she has to fuck her way out of the problem by having sex with a Columbian gangster.  She gets wounded when she revenges herself upon the bad guy and has to flee to Miami with her three sons.  She has smuggled some high-grade uncut cocaine into the US in her underclothes -- like a good Corman movie, the drug mules, all shapely Latinas, carry cocaine in their brassieres so we  get to see lots of breast in the movie as they disrobe to access their drugs (at heart, Griselda, despite its pretensions, is a exploitation film.)  Griselda clashes with local drug lords in Miami.  She recruits about a dozen prostitutes from Medellin to smuggle coke into the country.  When the gangsters running the business in Miami threaten her, she essentially gives the stuff away for free, thereby creating a host of customers in the Florida middle-class -- tennis pros, lady realtors and scum of that sort. (The film is a technicolor billboard advertising the benefits of recreational cocaine -- there are lots of picturesque party scenes with semi-naked girls).  Griselda is fierce, cruel, and relentless -- she's also clever and establishes herself as a powerful force in the local drug industry.  She vanquishes a series of foes, having their lieutenants and dealers slaughtered in showy assassinations and becomes the Godmother of the Miami drug trade.  The first three episodes detailing Griselda's rise to power are the best parts of the show and quite entertaining -- it's always fun to see a scrappy, fearless underdog battle her way to the top against all odds; audiences like to see those who are ostensibly weak and helpless overcome bullies and this is the appeal of the first half of the six-part show.  But, then, Griselda becomes the bully and, like Tony Montana, starts sampling her wares until she becomes increasingly paranoid and unstable.  Her paranoia climaxes in a spectacular tantrum that she pitches in episode five in which Griselda fires hundreds of rounds from a gold-plated machine gun, forces party-guests to copulate in front of her at gunpoint, and threatens her husband (and the father of her fourth son) with murder.  By episode six, Griselda is sucking down the fumes from crack cocaine, smooching with a sexy lady-friend for some simulated lesbian sex (I said that this was an exploitation picture at its core), and ordering increasingly arbitrary murders.  (She is surrounded by a gang of about a hundred Marielitos, that is Cuban refugee-gangsters like DePalma's Tony Montana, and lives in a huge fortress that, for some reason, the cops are afraid to raid.)  Things deteriorate, Griselda's husband, whom she has threatened to kill, flees to Columbia with her youngest son, Michael Corleone Sepulveda.  After fleeing to California, the Columbian mob in Miami pursues her relentlessly and Griselda has to surrender to the cops to escape the vengeance of the gangsters she has offended.  Griselda goes to prison.  While she is in jail, three of sons get killed.  Griselda follows through on her threat to have her husband murdered.  We last see her on the beach remembering happier days.

The show features a female detective, Jane, also Latina, who is posited as the righteous, if equally competent and deadly, mirror-image to Griselda.  The picture contrives several confrontations between the two women in the last couple acts of the series but, not surprisingly, they don't have a whole lot to say to one another.  What they do discuss is politically retrograde.  Jane tells the imprisoned Griselda that she retired for a while from police work to attend to her child (she's also a single mother like Griselda in the first three episodes).  While Jane was staying at home, Griselda was out breaking the law with the effect that her familia is wrecked -- her three sons get killed and she has her husband murdered.  Sofia Vergera is good as Griselda -- she plays a variant on the Latina spitfire, but is pretty effective in that role.  She alternately looks vulpine, glamorous, and, sometimes, even seems ugly.  Of course, she dresses in form-fitting low-cut garments to show off her figure. The last couple episodes are intricate and there are many coincidences and haphazard fits and starts on the path to Griselda's demise.  The writing is serviceable, but the effectiveness of the dialogue is hard to evaluate since it is mostly performed  as harangues in Spanish.  (Griselda gives several speeches to rouse her Cuban-born army -- in these  scenes, she's a bit like Henry V in Shakespeare's play:  "once more into the breach dear friends!") Griselda has a habit of tracing the outlines of buildings, the horizon, or distant groups of people with the tip of her lit cigarette -- I have no idea what this quirk is supposed to mean.  The broad outline of the story is based on the real life exploits of Griselda Blanco.  You can read about her on Wikipedia and see her picture -- needless to say, in real life the woman looked like a dumpy version of Al Capone; Griselda bears about as much resemblance to the real facts as the glamorous Sofia Vergera bears to the frumpy real-life gangster.  The show has strong feminist themes but these are stewed in a pot that is mostly exploitation.   

Griselda Blanco's real son, Michael Corleone Sepulveda sued Netflix over the film that he claimed to be defamatory.  The Court dismissed his lawsuit with prejudice.