Opera legend Maria Callas tries to restore her vocal ability amidst her mind’s unravelling in the new film from Pablo Larrain.
In between narratives centered around prominent political figures and movements in his native country of Chile, filmmaker Pablo Larrain has been building a cinematic trilogy of iconic 20th century women that started with Jackie in 2016, which saw Natalie Portman play Jacqueline Kennedy, followed by Spencer in 2021 that starred Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. Both of those entries in this thematic cinematic trio were excellent, so it’s a shame to report that the final film, Maria, closes the trilogy on a dour, disappointing note despite the career-best effort from its lead star and Larrain’s boundless creativity.
Maria stars Angelina Jolie as opera star Maria Callas throughout the last week of her life in September 1977, where at this point she lives a reclusive existence in Paris, France as she tries incredibly hard to resume her career in stage performance despite being diagnosed with dermatomyositis, a rare degenerative muscular disease that caused her vocal decline. During sessions with her pianist Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) and out of nowhere to her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), Maria yearns for validation that she can still sing like the songstress she once was, which the diva and everyone around her refers to as ‘La Callas’.
While this is going on, the inner war in Maria’s mind drives her to avoid visits from Doctor Fontainebleau (Vincent Macaigne) who has grim results of a recent blood test, take an uncomfortable amount of sedatives that bring to mind certain milestones of her affair with businessman Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), hallucinate that a camera crew led by journalist Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is interviewing her for a documentary, and driving both Bruna and her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) crazy with her unreasonable demands.
The previous films in Larrain’s loosely connected trilogy were driven by captivating work from his lead actresses, and Maria is no different. Angelina Jolie spent seven months working with two trainers to prepare for this role, and her efforts here are among the best performances not only of the year, but also of her entire career. She conveys Maria’s inner melancholy through brilliant silence in a private instance where Bruna brushes her hair before bed, as if we see the reality of her situation hitting her in real time.
Meanwhile, Jolie’s vocal abilities throughout the opera recreations are as remarkably magnetizing as her expressions during renditions of La Callas’s iconic arias; the visible strains that form across her face conjure heartbreaking sympathy, countered by the moments of Maria meandering the cultured avenues of Paris in an aimless hypnotic trance; consumed by the vain fantasy that she is still in the spotlight, in addition to the delusion her career is preservable.
Pablo Larrain’s directorial ingenuity also adds to the experience of watching Maria, from the use of various film stocks to represent different time periods and even mental states of the opera legend, to heartbreaking framing right from the get-go in an opening montage of Maria’s life and career set to La Callas singing to the camera in black and white, representative of her spirit’s suffocation by her affliction. Larrain also adds a surreality to his trilogy capper on Maria’s walks, such as when all the men passing through Trocadéro Square band together to sing the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, visualizing the legend’s belief of an opera stage within her mind.
On that note, as excellent of an actor-director collaboration that Jolie and Larrain are together, Maria falls well short of greatness, no thanks in part to the uneven foundation on the pages of its script. In a pre-recorded introduction, Larrain suggested that the film was an attempt to bring opera back to the general public, and prove that it isn’t only for the elites. Unfortunately, his thesis is lost amongst an aimless recycling of the same five scenarios over and over again with no signs of character progression or thematic resolution, with the only substantial idea being, as Maria puts it, ‘life is opera’, which isn’t elaborated upon further, falling flat with its familiarity.
The narrative here is such a dour and boring slog that audiences are left asking themselves, ‘surely there’s more to La Callas than these unsettling final days?’ But even some expressions of her madness can be misinterpreted as scenes meant for comedic effect, like Maria’s frequent orders for Bruna and Ferruccio to move her grand piano from one end of the hallway to the other. It’s also worth wondering if the interview subplot could be removed from the film entirely for its redundancy, if only because the movie better manifests the star’s vanity and psychological instability elsewhere.
Overall, Maria is a muddled biopic and a disappointing conclusion to Pablo Larrain’s makeshift trilogy about 20th century female idols for its lack of a cohesive narrative or thematic depth, but still should appeal at least to opera aficionados for its soundtrack full of famous movements, and is ultimately worth seeing for Angelina Jolie’s commanding performance, even if viewers will be left wanting more from her than what the screenplay allows.