In Maria, a biopic of the late, great opera singer Maria Callas that premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, Angelina Jolie tackles her first big leading role in three years—and her first major dramatic role in far longer. She was, it seems, drawn to director Pablo Larraín’s woozy picture of an icon in decline, perhaps because Larraín has done this before, with good results for his actors.
Maria is the third film in Larraín’s series of interior, nonlinear studies of famous women at a crossroads. Jackie follows Jacqueline Kennedy in the days immediately after the assassination of her husband. Spencer peers in on Princess Diana as she spends one last miserable weekend with then Prince Charles and his family. Larraín has developed something of a brand, an upending of biopic norms that seeks to uncover core emotional truth rather than dutifully reenact a series of events. It worked brilliantly in the strangely frightening Jackie, slightly less so in the stiflingly gloomy Spencer.
Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film. With a few details removed, Maria could be about any grand diva, this blurry picture of a woman swanning through the final week of her life. Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight don’t convince us of the iconography; they shoot past artful abstraction and land in the realm of vagueness.
This could partly be blamed on their choice of subject. Callas, who died at 53 in 1977, was certainly a legend of the opera world, renowned around the globe. She suffered her fair share of tragedies and tabloid scandals. But she does not engender the same sort of international fascination associated with Jackie and Diana, such enduring emblems of glamour and privilege darkened by cruel twists of fate. I’d imagine that most audience members will walk into Maria with fewer preconceived notions, less readiness to fill in the gaps in Larraín’s portraiture. His particular trick proves less effective when it isn’t subverting or complicating long-held ideas about a person.
What biographical information the film does contain is clunkily delivered. In black-and-white flashback, we learn that Callas was essentially pimped out by her own mother during the Second World War, a trauma that this version of Callas never recovers from. That’s compelling pathology, but Larraín doesn’t linger on it. He’s more interested in Callas’s affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), which would eventually be undone by Onassis’s marriage to Jackie Kennedy. (Perhaps Larraín is quite deliberately looping back on himself.) The film trusts we will feel the grand drama of this tortured romance, but such swells of emotion never arrive. Similarly undercooked and overly telegraphed are Callas’s hallucinatory musings about life, art, and career, given to an imagined interviewer played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. There is little insight to be found in these interludes, coy and generic as they are.
Still, Jolie brings some life to this programmatic exercise. She murmurs and laments in a pleasing midcentury accent, one that doesn’t sound much like the real Callas’s but is a nifty bit of transformation anyway. Jolie keenly renders Callas’s regret and wounded pride, which flicker across her face as she tries to keep her head held as high as a prima donna’s should be. She doesn’t push as far into inner depths as Natalie Portman did in Jackie, but that’s not exactly being asked of Jolie here. In some ways she is meant only to be a physical manifestation of the music—recordings of Callas that play throughout the film, sometimes mixed in with Jolie’s own singing. Jolie struggles in these scenes, never quite convincing us that these huge notes and plaintive lilts are actually coming from her. Whether that’s a problem with Jolie’s performance or the postproduction sound-matching process, the film suffers for it. These moments of Callas lost in song, or struggling through it, are the tentpoles of Maria, but they prove pretty wobbly.
The uncanny-valley singing is representative of the fussy artifice of Maria as a whole. Our admiration for the ardor Larraín feels for these oft-misunderstood women, figures battered and ennobled by the forces of money and history, begins to curdle. With Spencer and especially with Maria, the director seems less like he is reaching for understanding and more like he is bending his subjects’ legacies toward his preferred style—as if he has been merely searching for tragic women of the past to send wandering around his luxe, prefabricated haunted houses.
I still prefer his mode of biography to the standard varietal—at least in these sorts of films, there is some attempt to grapple with the ineffable. But should Larraín continue this project, it might serve him well to adjust the approach. Perhaps he could turn his focus to characters like the ones sensitively played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher in Maria, a doting butler and cook who tend to their ailing employer with the care of concerned family members. Through their quiet and despairing presence, Maria hits on something stirring, the idea that these two individuals might be the last people on earth who truly know this dying star. It’s only in their eyes that we catch the glimmering reflection of something Maria otherwise denies us: a woman in full.
