An aging singer, years past her prime and in failing health after decades of self-abuse, attempts a Pyrrhic comeback. The compressed structure of a few days in the life of a doomed diva expands outward and backward, taking on the shape of a conventional biopic to explore substance abuse, exploitation as an adolescent, and a history of doomed relationships with older men. A much beloved but recently little-seen actress of a certain age slides into a plum, awards-friendly role that allows her to showcase the physical ravages of an eating disorder and chemical dependency as well as her magnetism while holding the spotlight even in decline. Is the film being described here Pablo Larraín’s Maria, or is it Judy, which only five years ago won Renee Zellweger her second Academy Award before all but disappearing from our collective memory (seriously, does anybody remember the major motion picture Judy)? That such a distillation can be easily transposed onto Maria without any tortured contortions is perhaps the single most damning thing one can say about it; no amount of artful obfuscation can conceal how overwhelmingly common and reductive the film is.
Reportedly the concluding chapter in Larraín’s unofficial trilogy about famous women living under a microscope, following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, Maria is placed at a disadvantage while also being somewhat liberated by its subject’s lack of cultural purchase (and with it, attendant baggage) in 2024. Angelina Jolie stars as the famed soprano Maria Callas in her final days; the film opens with the singer’s body being removed by the coroners from her lavish Parisian apartment in 1977 before jumping back in time one week. Withdrawn from the public after having refused to perform in front of audiences for years, Maria, as presented here, is a prescription drug addict whose only real human connections are her endlessly supportive housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), and increasingly concerned butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino). Regal and sphinx-like, with a droll sense of humor that conceals her casual cruelty — she requires the ailing Ferruccio to drag her grand piano from one end of her apartment to the other, like a real-life Sisyphus, despite never actually playing it — Maria is caught between her drug-fueled fantasies and her unrealistic hopes of recapturing her almost otherworldly singing voice, which has worsened alongside her health. Prone to strolls through Paris with Mandrax, an imagined journalist played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who allows her to interrogate herself — that the character shares a name with the powerful narcotic that Maria pops like candy is illustrative of Steven Knight’s Symbolism For Dummies approach to the film’s screenplay — Callas views street life as a series of tableaux made up of singing extras performing opera, practically begging her to lead them in song. But even in her intoxicated state, she demonstrates reticence. Maria is her own harshest critic, and if she can no longer summon the towering voice that so enthralled audiences throughout the ’50s and ’60s, why should she even try?
Hiding her pill intake from her doting employees while refusing to eat, Callas’ final days are presented as a state of controlled delirium; moving between reality and fantasy with the ever stately and stylish singer never betraying her fractured mind or rapidly eroding physical health. She escapes her flat to sit outside her favorite bistro so that she may bask in the adulation of passersby — “I did not come here to eat, I come to restaurants to be adored” — as well as considers a possible return to performing with her supportive rehearsal pianist (Stephen Ashfield), if not for her than for him. Through it all, her mind wanders back to her tempestuous romance with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who viewed Maria as a prize to be possessed and controlled all while refusing to marry her (in an irony surely not lost on Larraín, Onassis would instead go on to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, the subject of his earlier film). With body and mind in a state of deterioration and time running out, Maria is caught between departing this world on her own uncompromising terms and leaving behind one final, stirring performance to be remembered by.
As with his earlier historical dramas, Larraín is using a finite time period coinciding with a personal inflection point to sketch an impressionistic portrait of a woman who transfixed the public while remaining shrouded in secrecy. However, in choosing that time period to be the final week of Maria’s life, Larraín and Knight (who previously collaborated on Spencer) have imbued the film with a level of enormity and portent that strains the gossamer conceit. Further, perhaps in recognition that Maria Callas is far from a household name for most viewers under the age of 50, the film required to inch perilously close to going the “cradle to grave” route in establishing the singer’s cultural importance from a bygone era. Early on in Maria, Larraín cuts together an extended montage of Jolie performing on stages around the world — in a concession to the reality that she is not the single greatest opera singer of the 20th century, and to pretend otherwise would defeat the entire purpose of the project, the actress emphatically lip-syncs to Callas’ recordings throughout the film — while the film’s regularly occurring flashbacks take us from the singer’s teenage years in Athens as a plaything for Nazi officers to commiserating with none other than President Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson, who, in an amusing bit of trivia, previously played JFK in both Jackie and Blonde) over their respective wayward romantic partners. Taken as a whole, it all reflects a film that feels confused in its purpose and almost boilerplate, sacrificing immediacy and intimacy for something more superficial. The film even concludes with the moldiest of tropes: showing us Super 8 archival footage under the end credits of the real Callas in happier times, anachronistically scored to Brian Eno’s elegiac “An Ending (Ascent).” The trick with these films is that we’re meant to extrapolate roiling undercurrents of desperation and inner resolve from fleeting snapshots that, in and of themselves, do not define a person, whereas here we have characters telling Maria to her face that her efforts to resume singing are literally killing her or serving up greeting card sentiments like “Jackie was his wife, you were his life.”
And yet Maria cannot be entirely dismissed in large part due to Jolie’s performance. Possessing Callas’ towering demeanor and aloofness, if not quite her bone structure — and let us be thankful the film didn’t saddle the actress with a large prosthetic nose even if that has historically proven to be a shortcut to acting prizes — Jolie is leveraging her own well-documented celebrity to lend the performance a knowing sadness and almost royal disposition. It never comes across like mere impersonation, in part because footage of the singer is less prevalent (certainly compared to Jackie Kennedy or Princess Diana), but also because the role truly feels like an extension of the actress. Maria comports herself like a Greek goddess walking amongst mortals, even in her own home; the character is often shown surrounded by antiquities and racks of designer clothes, and it takes a performer of a certain outsized stature to not be overwhelmed by production design this grandiose. Between the majesty of Paris — the film sneaks the Eiffel Tower into more shots than is really necessary — and the period couture, Maria can’t help but resemble a perfume commercial or a splashy spread in Vogue, yet Jolie is never subsumed by the costuming or setting. Even facing a tragic end, the character remains a vital figure, as though she were holding tight to a secret that stokes the dying embers inside of her. It’s a largely internalized performance, registering quiet disappointment — both in how the events of her life have played out, as well as in her own damaged instrument — but also defiance toward well-meaning handlers and impertinent outsiders who would question her professional and personal choices. Jolie has always possessed an almost alien quality that makes it difficult to cast her as a mere mortal — there’s a reason she mostly plays Disney villainesses and superheroes these days — and in Maria Callas, she’s found a role where her blinding star power needn’t be dimmed nor diminished to meet the moment.
DIRECTOR: Pablo Larraín; CAST: Angelina Jolie, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: November 27; STREAMING: December 11; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
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