‘Maria’ Review: Angelina Jolie Hits The High Notes As Doomed Diva Maria Callas In Pablo Larraín’s Curiously Bloodless Biopic – Venice Film Festival

Stephanie Bunbury

August 30, 2024 at 2:45 AM·4 min read

No director working today has a greater command of the medium than the Chilean maestro Pablo Larraín, whose previous achievements in the generally unloved biopic genre — Jackie and Spencer — are now joined by his sweeping reimagining of the last days of Maria Callas. Every element in Maria speaks of that mastery: the first deep-focus shots of Callas’ lush Parisian apartment, where the light through the window is transfigured into a kind of mist; the bold and brilliant use of diegetic music, so essential to conjuring Callas’ world; and the elegant merger of past and present, dream and reality.

Maria Callas died in 1977, aged 53, and, as anyone even faintly interested in opera knows, she had a life of tumult, torment and tragedy that was itself operatic in scope. The events in Steven Knight’s finely constructed script take place over one week, but Callas (Angelina Jolie) spends much of that time relating or remembering fragments of the past, inviting the viewer to piece them together to form a life. We see her mother forcing her to sing for occupying Fascists during the Second World War. We catch glimpses of her longstanding affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), whom she willingly allowed to control and confine her. We see her make a bonfire out of her costumes after her voice has roughened.

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Other filmmakers might dodge the music itself, overwhelming as it is, but Larraín opens the floodgates to its oceanic surge. There are entire dazzling arias; some are re-created on the great stages of Europe and some are seemingly figments of Maria’s expansive imagination. One of the most extraordinary scenes is her encounter under the Eiffel Tower with a horde of Parisian workers who are suddenly, inexplicably belting out Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore, the square becoming a vast theatre set. And then, just as suddenly, they disappear and she is alone in the street save for her amanuensis, Mandrax. Along with us, he listens to her stories.

But Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee, appropriately strange) isn’t real either. Always obliging, he is actually a personification of the prescription drugs to which Callas is spectacularly addicted. Her loyal housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) have various tasks: cooking special meals to tempt her away from starvation, moving her piano from one room to another and going through her pockets, trying to find her secret stashes of pills. Of course, she is too clever for them, brushing aside their gentle queries as to whether the TV crew she says she is expecting actually exists. “What is real and what is not real is my business,” she says grandly. Callas is perfectly aware she conjures people who aren’t there. Of course she does. The best part of her life — the only part that matters — has been about exactly that.

Jolie is an almost magical match for the real diva: achingly thin but still beautiful, loftily patrician, capriciously kind or selfish, tip-toeing dangerously close to madness. The actor’s commitment to this creation is obvious at every turn. Knowing that Callas was only happy when on stage, she learned to sing for the role; the voice we hear is a blend of Callas and Jolie’s own. Even more importantly, we can see her chest rise and veins swell as she is consumed, body and soul, by the physical and emotional effort of singing. “You have no idea the pain of pulling music through your belly out of your poor mouth,” Maria snaps at a fan who dares to recall one of her many concert cancellations. “No idea!” You can’t show that without living it.

And yet, somehow, the portrait the film draws is curiously bloodless. Callas the woman remains distant and unknowable; cunning to the end, she eludes us. Larraín is clearly interested in the mannered presentation of certain very famous women; Natalie Portman’s Jackie Kennedy and Kristen Stewart’s Diana Spencer were also works of artifice. Callas is similarly studied, but to the point of seeming stilted. Our enduring image of her is a composition of limbs and couture posed at a café table, waiting for the adulation of passers-by. We are watching a performance of a performance.

The curtain duly falls, reprising a prologue in which we see that Callas has just died. The heightened emotion that transfixed us in the excerpts from Medea or Madama Butterfly is strikingly absent here. Larraín keeps the camera at a distance; the body is hidden behind a chair. Nothing to see here, you might say, even though there has been — as always in a Pablo Larraín film — so much to see. Something is missing. Perhaps it is that there is nothing of the grit and grind of politics, which often works as the sand in his narrative oyster, not only in the Chilean films like Neruda or No, but Jackie and Spencer too. Maria tells a fascinating story, but it lacks that rasping edge.

Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Netflix
Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenwriter: Steven Knight
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino
Running time: 2 hrs 3 mins

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‘Maria’ Review: Angelina Jolie Hits The High Notes As Doomed Diva Maria Callas In Pablo Larraín’s Curiously Bloodless Biopic – Venice Film Festival