With his third film about an iconic woman of the 20th century (Maria follows his films Jackie, about Jacqueline Kennedy, and Spencer, about Princess Diana), Chilean director Pablo Larraín once again creates a singular role that any modern actress would love to sink her teeth into. This time, Angelina Jolie is Maria Callas, the massively-famous opera singer who “lost her voice” at the surprisingly young age of 41 and became a recluse in Paris until her death at only 53.
Maria, like the other two films, is hyper-focused, concentrating on Callas’ last week where her only true companions were her longtime butler as housemaid. To sort of force a narration, Larraín imagines Maria hallucinating the attentions of a TV crew, whom she hosts in her apartment (despite her staff telling her no one is coming), and slowly walks with through the city, relaying the highlights of her life to her new audience (and us). It’s clear to us and the staff that TV crew is most likely not actually there. After all, the reporter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is named Mandrax, which happens to also be the name of Maria’s addictive drug of choice, the pills of which she hides throughout the apartment in the pockets of dressing gowns and old costumes.
The dutiful housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) are Maria’s only friends, it seems, and they have enough love and devotion to her to ask a doctor to wait hours in her apartment while Maria leaves the house under the guise of being busy. But she is going to practice singing with a pianist daily, hoping to re-find her voice, a challenge so taxing on her body that the doctor says it will eventually kill her.
Angelina Jolie is certainly dedicated to the role (the opening black and white scene of just Jolie as Callas singing directly into the camera is transfixing). Jolie absolutely embodies a glamorous “look at me but don’t look at me” reclusive star going to her old haunts where she knows she’ll be adored by, say, the waitstaff of a cafe. But she’s haunted by her past (and her hallucinations)—or so we are led to believe, as that is how Pablo Larraín tries to flesh out the “bio” in this biopic. For instance, an intriguing flashback from the 1950s has Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) literally stealing Maria away from her husband at a party, because he simply “steals what he wants”. We are led to believe that Onassis is the love of her life, but one scene later, we see they are bored and irritated with each other after just three years. He apparently didn’t let her sing while they were together, which would have been life-altering and destructive at the height of her career, but it is almost an afterthought in the story.
Perhaps that’s why Maria, the movie and the woman herself, is a tough nut to crack: her most important lifelong relationship wasn’t with a man, or her beloved sister, or even her household staff… it was with opera. And when the perfect harmony between her and the thing she loved most became flawed, it literally destroyed her. But even though in a pre-film intro director Pablo Larraín points out that opera was intended for the average layperson, this layperson only got a peripheral taste of how her particular talent affected an audience. In one scene, Maria becomes irritated when a fan gushes that her performances made them weep… and the poor person was dismissed. I left the film feeling that perhaps viewers like me, who aren’t aficionados of opera, end up feeling at arms’ length from Maria just like that disappointed fan—maybe we simply aren’t good enough to be let into her exclusive relationship.
