Directed by Pablo Larraín | Written by Steven Knight | 124 min | ▲▲▲△△
One of the most famous women of the 21st Century plays one of the most famous of the 20th. You can see why Angelina Jolie would choose the role, to be Maria Callas. Anyone can see their parallel relationships with the media of their respective ages. Back in Callas’ day, even the respected journalists like Mike Wallace never thought twice about drilling down with questions about the opera star’s personal life — the evidence is still available on YouTube. These days the stars and their publicists have much more power — if a journalist asked Angelina about her ongoing and messy legal battles with ex-husband Brad Pitt they’d be blackballed, but now that’s the arena of tabloid journos whose weapons are the cameras of the paparazzi. I’m sure the attention is similar.
Unlike Jolie, Callas was washed up by the time she was in her 50s. She’d spent the best part of a decade with millionaire shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (played here by Haluk Bilginer), who left her for Jackie Kennedy. He apparently didn’t want Callas to perform, so she let her gift go fallow. When she finally performed again in the early ’70s the critics weren’t kind about the degradation in her voice, but she still held a cult of personality.
When we meet her in Maria, she’s living in her sprawling, gorgeous apartment on Avenue Georges Mendel in Paris, largely alone and isolated but for her housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), butler/chauffeur, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), and two mini poodles. She doesn’t seem to have any friends and her jet-setting life of glamour is all in the past. She’s cultivating a serious addiction to prescription medication and ignoring her doctor’s concern around liver failure and heart disease.
She walks through Paris while being interviewed by a young reporter named Mandrax (a miscast Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has the same name as one of the drugs she’s taking — clearly he’s a figment of her imagination, but he allows us to flash back to the salad days, shot in black-and-white glory on the opera house stages of Europe and providing detail of her encounters with famous men, Onassis and President Kennedy himself. In Paris she makes an attempt to find her voice again in daily meetings with a pianist. She doesn’t want to perform for the public, she’s doing this for her own reasons.
This is the third film in Larraín’s unofficial trilogy of the lives of famous women, which includes Jackie and Spencer, the latter sharing prolific screenwriter Steven Knight, best known for gritty thrillers like Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, and Locke, though more recently he’s gone off with projects like Serenity. Like Maria, Jackie and Spencer do a terrific job of showing the cost of fame and the weight of public expectation on a high-profile figure, but this new movie is the weakest of the three. It serves as a worthy life support system for the startling performance at its centre, but it also runs afoul of too many biopic conventions.
The problem here is that Larraín takes a lot fewer risks than in those two earlier movies. Though Callas is painted as a woman obsessed with her past, wracked with regret, the filmmakers never quite dare show her as the diva she was said to have been — aside from a need to have her piano constantly moved from one room to another. Her emotions are blunted, and the script does her few favours — so many clumsy lines of dialogue too often drown Maria in cliche, the poor, lonely prima donna who is still loved for the power of her voice. Her staff are her key support system, but we never get to know anything about them beyond their devotion to their boss. It’s like they don’t want to look too closely at who she was in her worst, or best, moments.
Instead, we get to enjoy autumnal Paris shot in gorgeous, grainy light by Edward Lachman, and Jolie’s imperiousness. Her commitment to the role is striking — the scenes of her performing, both in the past and present, are a highlight — as is how Lachman and Larraín obsess over the geometry of their lead’s cheekbones and jawline, lighting her to get the most extreme, aquiline angles.
Jolie is able to convincingly convey the diva’s vulnerability in her final days, but the film is so busy making her the icon, like the marble statuary in her apartment, we never see beyond her essential mystery to what makes her genuinely human. I didn’t leave the cinema knowing much more about her than I knew before I went in, which is an almost fatal flaw in an otherwise worthy effort.
