Vulnerability was never part of the public image of Maria Callas, arguably the greatest of all 20th century opera divas, but Pablo Larraín and Angelina Jolie do their best to open that resolutely closed curtain, to render this larger-than-life artist in more fully human proportions.
After the filmmaker’s Jackie and Spencer, films that chose intimacy over scale, Maria often resists its own smaller moments, ultimately nestling comfortably with Larraín’s other portraits of very public women and their private pain.
Scope matters here; Jackie and Spencer took revealing snapshots of finite moments within the lives of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana. Though ostensibly set during her last week of life, Maria uses flashback and fantasy to hit the highlights of all that came before. Steven Knight’s screenplay employs a structure that marries the real (Callas works with a pianist to see if she can reclaim her once-legendary voice) and drug-distorted illusion, as when Callas (Jolie) imagines that she’s giving an interview for a TV documentary hosted by journalist Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee). (For American viewers, “mandrax” was the European name for quaaludes, which the film portrays as one of Callas’ several drugs of choice.)
Taking care of Callas as she fades in and out of reality are her devoted butler Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher); they humor her and try to protect her from an uncaring world, providing real love and care. The performers do the same for Maria, grounding it with empathetic and recognizable characters while Jolie — perhaps the most fitting performer to take on this role, a movie star in the old-fashioned sense, whose larger-than-life life existence sometimes wrestled with her on-screen work — has chosen to embrace the operatic, veering from fragility to ferocity but always acting in the superlative.
Jolie even commits to the singing part of the role, with her relatively untrained voice conveying Callas past her prime, as vintage recordings capture the singer at her peak. And Larraín isn’t shy about contrasting the two, particularly in a heartbreaking sequence where Callas croaks out the death scene from Anna Bolena for the pianist while, in her memory, she stuns a packed house at La Scala with the ferocity of her voice. Whether she’s singing or lip-synching, Jolie captures the full-body exertion of operatic performance, an intense physical act of aural and dramatic creation.
The actress is called upon to recreate many of Callas’ legendary roles, from Violetta to Aïda to Cio Cio-san, the latter in a hallucination that sees Callas in full Madama Butterfly makeup, surrounded by geishas holding paper lanterns, in front of an orchestra, all of them outdoors in a torrential rainstorm. These dreamlike moments give veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman the chance to be operatic himself, rather than confining him to the interiors of Callas’ sumptuous apartment; a sidewalk scene in which a group of Parisian men suddenly surround Callas and launch into the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore suggests that Larraín has a full-on filmed opera inside him, waiting to be made.
These flights of fancy come alive more effectively than Callas’ flashbacks to her childhood, singing for Nazi occupiers, or to her volatile relationship with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), which drag Maria, grudgingly, into standard-issue biopic territory. (And no, Larraín’s Jackie star Natalie Portman does not reprise her role as Onassis’ second wife, thus depriving the world of another shared cinematic universe.)
It’s a tug of war, as the demands of established biographical film form pull toward the relatively quotidian, while its own subject and star push to prove themselves something just a little more super than human. The best of these real-world scenes reflects the diva at her most vulnerable, meeting up with her sister Yakinthi (a sublime turn from Valeria Golino), who is perhaps the one person on Earth who will brook no illusions from La Callas.
“My life is opera,” says Maria at one point. Fitting, then, that Maria is most truly involved with its subject when it abandons any impulse to scale her down, to reduce a titan to life-size, and opts instead to remember the singer as grandiose, allowing her memory — and Jolie’s perfectly suited performance of that memory — to fill the biggest screen.
Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenwriter: Steven Knight
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino, Kodi Smit-McPhee
Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín, Jonas Dornbach, Lorenzo Mieli, Pablo Larraín
Executive producers: Christian Vesper, Andrea Scrosati, Seb Shorr, Steven Knight
Director of photography: Ed Lachman
Production design: Guy Hendrix Dyas
Costume design: Massimo Cantini Perrini
Editing: Sofía Subercaseaux
Music Supervisors: Milena Fessmann, Csaba Faltay
Sound design: Gwennolé Le Borgne, sound designer
Production companies: Fremantle, Filmnation Entertainment, The Apartment, Komplizen Film, Fabula
In English
124 minutes
