Needs More Diva
You won’t know Maria Callas after Pablo Larraín’s ‘Maria’ but you might want to hear ‘Turandot’.
Maria
Director: Pablo Larraín • Writer: Steven Knight
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer
Italy / Germany / Chile / USA • 2hrs 5mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 20 • IIA
Grade: B-
Full disclosure: My opera education comes mostly from the Looney Tunes’ Rabbit of Seville cartoon (a stone classic, fight me), and my only real brush with the form was seeing La bohème at La Scala many years ago (yes, that was humble bragging). So it must be said that all of the legendary soprano Maria Callas’s landmark performances referenced in Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s Maria are totally lost on me. Opera fans, however, are likely to lose their shit. Larraín has almost as distinctive a visual style as the great working bombasts Zack Snyder and Yorgos Lanthimos. Snyder’s moody speed ramping and Lanthimos’ singular commitment to stylised rigidity are their hallmarks the way Larraín has made Wounded Great 20th Century Women In Nice Rooms his. The trilogy based on said great women started with Natalie Portman in Jackie, as Jacqueline Kennedy in the days after JFK was assassinated in 1963, continued with Kristen Stewart as the late Princess Diana in Spencer, unfolding over the course of the world’s crappiest Christmas in 1991, and now closes with the last week in the life of Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulos in 1977. Stepping into the spotlight this time is Angelina Jolie as Callas, and while Jolie’s performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination and a Critics Choice nod, she didn’t score the Oscar nomination Portman and Stewart did. Larraín’s experiment is an interesting one that worked best (in Spencer) when he waded into the gothic, horror, psychological thriller pools he did in his underrated 2023 gem, El Conde, which posited dictator Augusto Pinochet as a vampire. Yeah. Discuss.
Pure Jolie
Maria’s gorgeous music moments make it more engaging than the sterile Jackie, but fan or not it’s undeniable that Jolie makes for a rock hard screen presence. She has an icy, steely persona that works terrifically in action (Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Salt) and fantasy (Maleficent, Beowulf) but she’s hard pressed to project legit warm humanity elsewhere. Exhibit A: Changeling. Exhibit B: A Mighty Heart. Super humanity, sure, but not the relatable empathy needed for something like Maria. Under the best of circumstances Callas, in Larraín and writer Steven Knight’s interpretation anyway, is vaguely unlikeable and gratingly delusional. The picture of her here is of a demanding, unreasonable princess losing touch with reality. If we don’t understand her, we don’t care, and Jolie comes very close to making us not care.
The last week of Callas’s life is told through a haze of sedatives and reflective melancholy, as Callas details her life to a journalist, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), which happens to be the brand name of a woozy sedative that goes into another drug Callas takes many of daily. She tools around Paris recalling her great performances among her major touchstones, like being forced to sing for Nazi officers by her mother (Lydia Koniordou), and her titanic romance with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) – who would later marry Jackie Kennedy (there’s no Portman cameo though). She visits conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) to suss out the quality of her voice, but retreats to the affirming safety of her loyal butler Ferruccio and housekeeper Bruna (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher) when things go sideways and the French press finds out. Then she dies.
Jolie isn’t bad in Maria, not even close, and she quite admirably subjected herself to seven months of opera training to get it right. And she lip synchs fabulously, let me tell you. Most of the performances we hear are the actual Callas from existing recordings, but when her voice starts failing it’s largely Jolie, where the imperfections (I got this on good authority) tell some of the story. It’s just too bad there wasn’t a bit more context to it. Callas was revered for her unconventional style and trailblazing dramatisations in a traditional form and it would be nice to know more about that legacy. It’s extra strange because in recent years Knight’s penned the stellar Peaky Blinders, Eastern Promises and Locke. But he did also write the overbearing Burnt and the patchwork melodrama Allied. Can’t win ’em all. In the end Maria is like a Maria Callas CD. It’s handsome and perfect and well-mounted and technically efficient; Edward Lachman’s cinematography is precise but lush, particularly in the black and white flashbacks, and mamma mia the production and costume design by Massimo Cantini Parrini (Ferrari) and Guy Hendrix Dyas (Inception) are truly eye-popping. But Callas’s groundbreaking and tortured life would have been better served feeling more like vinyl: earthy and full of vivid scratchiness.