Angelina Jolie Shines as La Callas in Maria, Larraín’s Surreal Ode to Opera
The camera inches forward through a dark doorway, panning slowly to an obscured scene in an ornate Parisian parlor – a death. It’s Sept. 16, 1977, and the world-renowned Greco-American soprano opera star Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) has been pronounced dead at only 53, of a heart attack, three years after retreating from the public eye into a reclusive existence. With Maria, Chilean director-producer Pablo Larraín’s Iconic 20th Century Women trilogy also comes to a close.
We might start at the end, but like Johnny Cash, Dewey Cox, and every other musician who’s received the prestige biopic treatment, Maria has to relive her whole life before she goes on stage. And La Callas’s final stage isn’t Folsom Prison. Hell, it’s not even material. As she so simply puts it, “The stage is in her mind.” (This coming from someone who believes doctors categorize genius as mental illness because they can’t understand it.)
“What is real and what is not real is my business,” Maria asserts to her pill-counting butler with the assurance of her genius. The line might as well come from Larraín, whose taste for surrealism across his trilogy has yo-yoed. Where Jackie only dabbled in waking dreams (or nightmares), Spencer went all in, leaving reality (and any semblance of Princess Di) on the cutting room floor. Now, Maria strikes a mature balance, an even, 50/50 blend. And unlike its predecessor, it tactfully weaves the unreal with the real, which makes for a surreality worth investigating.
We follow Maria in her final days wandering around Paris as she self-medicates and desperately attempts to piece her voice back together. Through the framework of a feature-length interview taking place in her head, screenwriter Steven Knight regularly hearkens back to the most significant moments in her life to tell her story, the film residing in the past as much as 1977.
Mandrax is her favorite drug, her confidant, her reporter and her camera crew. She pops the Quaaludes like candy, liberally and often. When she’s on the barbiturate-esque sedative, it manifests in the form of a lanky, greasy-haired young journalist also named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who fanatically prods at whatever Maria wants to reminisce on.
Together, they find themselves in chimerical situations that accentuate Maria’s layered interior world alongside her love for living in the past. (For example, a chorus of Japanese women dressed in radiant orange kimonos, holding glowing rice paper lanterns, descends upon Maria at the foot of a stately French building in what feels like one sensational swoon of a number.)
On the other hand, the fantasies accentuate Maria’s severe reticence to face the day. After a lifetime of global adoration, she struggles to settle into relative nothingness. And the weight of that irrelevance gets heavier and heavier for Maria as she drifts into a deeper psychosis. She says things to her butler like, “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know my name. I’m in the mood for adulation.” Yet, in her weakness, Maria is rarely pitiable. If anything, Larraín aims to deify her, the film an apotheosis of her memory.
Maria was something Jackie and Diana never were, something very close to Larraín’s heart: an artist. He makes a point to show how Maria’s art has transcended even the most hateful forces. In a flashback to her childhood under Nazi occupation, we witness the film’s most hair-raising moment. A teenage Maria begins to take her clothes off for a Nazi officer who’s entered her family’s home, only to be told by the officer to leave the clothes on and sing (knowing full well that her sister isn’t getting the same treatment in the other room). His face quivers until it cracks into tears, the pure beauty of Maria’s voice a treat so rare that it makes him feel something, allowing him to abandon the sickness of his soul for a brief moment.
Jolie is absolutely transfixing as Maria. She dons an elegant, measured purr of a voice and a lion’s gait, graceful and strong. She pieces her sentences together carefully and traipses around like a leaden ribbon being pulled through the air one steady, strenuous step at a time. The minutiae of Jolie’s face when she sings is an acting feat, lips bending and curling in perfect step with the veteran vibrato as her eyebrows lift and furrow through every emotion imaginable. It’s mostly the real Maria’s voice we’re hearing, but Jolie’s is in the mix, too. She trained for 7 months to be able to perform during the shoot.
The history baked into Maria is fascinating, one of the film’s greatest strengths. Much like Jackie, Maria sings with historical context, some of which even unite the timeless 20th century women, like attending the JFK party in which Marilyn Monroe salaciously sang the (Mr.) President happy birthday. Or the fact that Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) ripped them both from the jaws of their respective husbands (not without fateful help from an assassin, of course). He was a self-obsessed rat swimming in money. But Maria fell for him, because with him, she could be a girl again. With him, she wasn’t tied down, until she wanted to be, eventually relegated to Onassis’s “whatever” after he married Jackie.
The music is nothing short of a spell, the soft up-and-down piano climb of each opera’s overture slowly waving into the sound mix, an enveloping technique (if not a touch overused) that almost always heightens the emotion of the moment. And then, of course, there’s the belting. The screenplay – dare I say libretto – leaves little to be desired in terms of swooning surreality, enchanting history, and opera. But it’s by-the-book for Larraín, whose scripts, and concomitant arsenal of storytelling techniques, have been less varied since 2019’s Ema, despite exceptional cinematography for El Conde and Maria from living legend Edward Lachman.
Maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) are a sheer delight. They’re both her parents and her children, their sweet demure with and guidance of Maria mother- and father-like, if not for the gentle subservience and being warmly ordered around. Barring the occasional dragging sequence – most of which come at the hands of dull, grating, clichéd conversations between Maria and conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) – the film is a trance throughout. It’s hard to stop watching Maria, to stop listening to La Callas, to leave her charming little makeshift family for too long.