By Sandra Hall
MARIA ★★★½
(M) 124 minutes
Maria is Maria Callas, but you won’t find too many high notes in Pablo Larrain’s biopic. This is the third of his films about famous women, and they all share the same viewpoint. He likes to drop in on their lives during their darkest days.
Angelina Jolie plays doomed opera singer Maria Callas in Maria.
His first, Jackie (2016), started with John F. Kennedy’s death and drew a fiercely intimate portrait of his widow after the tragedy. Its insights were new as well as persuasive, and the effect was extraordinarily raw. Then came Spencer (2021), which offered a totally implausible perspective on Princess Diana’s relationship with the royals down to what they had for breakfast.
Maria is much more believable but just as gloomy, concentrating on the last two weeks of Callas’ life, which means her rise to fame, operatic triumphs and affair with Onassis are presented in fragments dolefully overshadowed by the wisdom of hindsight. We know they will not end well because Callas (Angelina Jolie) is not ending well. Dependent on Mandrax and other prescription drugs, she’s taken to hiding her stash in her coat pockets so her touchingly fond and loyal butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), and housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), can’t remove them and lock them away.
Much of this scenario unfolds in her rambling Paris apartment against a backdrop that provides a distraction from the prevailing melancholy with the richness of its design. Everything in it resonates with memories of a glorious past. It also houses the film’s one real joke – a running gag that has the piano repeatedly moved from room to room by the long-suffering Ferruccio because Callas can’t decide where she wants it.
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas and Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis in Maria.
And along with the memories, there are dreams and hallucinations brought on by the Mandrax. Onassis frequently appears in her dreams and she’s accompanied on her walks around Paris by Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee as an imaginary filmmaker she’s sardonically named Mandrax. Even though she knows he doesn’t exist, she refers to him as if he does.
Jolie’s is a wholly convincing performance. She has never had any difficulty in conjuring up an air of authority on screen. Whether she’s playing grand dames or action heroes, “don’t mess with me” is her default position, so Callas’ flair for melodrama is well served. It also comes with a fine edge of self-mockery. Jolie’s Callas has exulted in playing the diva for most of her life, yet she’s all too aware of the fragility and falseness of the role.
Larrain has taken great care over the opera scenes, requiring Jolie to take singing lessons and sing, rather than mime, during the shoot. Callas’ voice was then laid over hers in the editing to powerful effect.
Callas is just 54, but she cuts a lonely figure in these final weeks. Onassis has been dead for two years and three years have passed since her farewell tour, yet one of the few people she sees is a friend and former conductor who is working with her in a doomed attempt to bring her voice back to the point where she can sing in public again.
Her closest relationships are with Ferruccio, who dares to be candid, while Bruna expresses her feelings wordlessly. She may tell her she’s in good voice, but her refusal to stop what she’s doing to listen properly says it all.
These sequences are tenderly played in an exquisitely realised film, but it’s relentlessly downbeat and frustratingly slow. The flashbacks are tantalising, doled out so sparingly they inevitably leave you wanting more. Callas had a big life, and maybe it has been picked over many times in print and on film, but this stripped-down version left me feeling short-changed.
Maria is released in cinemas on January 30.
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