Maria: Lavish Biopic on Opera Star Boosts Angelina Jolie… ‘La Callas’ Not So Much

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

For a biopic about Maria Callas, one of opera’s most vivacious personalities, director Pablo Larraín’s visually sumptuous Maria is unusually downbeat.

That makes the film a superb dramatic canvas for Angelina Jolie, excellent here, whose thousand-yard stares and obstruse pronouncements about opera and life capture the apparent melancholy swaddling Callas at the end of her life as she popped pills, mourned dead lovers, and witnessed her once magnificent voice decline.

The film opens with the American-born, Greek-reared singer’s death in September 1977 at age 53, as she lies prostrate on the floor of the grand Paris apartment she shares with loyal housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) though by her own estimation, the pair are more enablers and companions-of-convenience than standard-issue employees.

Maria then shifts back a week and so begins the action, which mostly remains rooted in the lead-up to Callas’ death, but which surveys her greatest stage performances through flashbacks scattered throughout the film in far fewer numbers and briefer segments than might be expected.

Indeed, Callas’ fraught relationship with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer, wow) occupies outsize real estate in the film, notably in two extended sequences where she first meets the crafty shipping magnate at a party held in her honour, and later, when the pair make their peace as he lies on his deathbed.

Both Callas and Onassis were married when they met, though neither seemed especially bothered by the scandalous optics of their affair, which the film portrays as launching under the nose of Callas’ then-husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini as the couple joined Onassis on his yacht at his openly lascivious behest.

The film also links Onassis to his future wife Jacqueline Kennedy, suggesting their romance began while she was still married to John F. Kennedy. Maybe. Jackie knew him as her sister Lee Radziwill had dated him. Perhaps more crucially and speculatively, Maria seems to posit that Onassis’ marriage to Jackie was Callas’ greatest heartbreak. That’s also a maybe; I’m inclined to suspect her diminished voice was ultimately more gutting.

Oddly, that seems to be corroborated by a dramatic scene where a conniving reporter ambushes Callas after covertly witnessing a rehearsal where her voice wavers. The look of sheer agony on Jolie/Callas’ face as she is confronted with a reality those in her circle have proactively downplayed far surpasses the bitterness she registers regarding Jackie.

Potentially more problematic for Maria is an odd narrative conceit constructed to lay out the finer points of the singer’s backstory without drowning the plot in lengthy exposition. Early on, Callas tells Ferruccio that a television crew is coming to interview her, a prospect the weary butler doubts.

The interviewer who arrives (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is named Mandrax, just like the pills Callas relentlessly pops, lest we miss the allusion to his hallucinatory status, which occurs in lockstep with other visions Callas claims to be having. Anyway, while either sitting in Callas’ apartment or walking the streets of Paris, Mandrax asks thorny questions no one would dare invoke with a subject as imperious and glum.

That said, much of what makes Maria work is what you’d expect: the dynamic music and costumes, the pretty European street scenes, some spontaneous crowd singing and the bird’s eye view of a woman with a sometimes turbulent, often outsize life not dissimilar to one of her famous roles. The camera also loves Jolie’s face, and she is captured almost relentlessly in closeup from start to finish.

Director Larraín has shown himself to be both adept at and fascinated by exactly this kind of complex and complicated woman, in his depictions of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 2016’s Jackie and Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer from 2021.

I’d rank Maria behind Jackie and ahead of the narratively woozy Spencer. In each, powerful lead performances and attention to period detail are enormously entertaining. But I can’t say I walked away with new knowledge or a fresh perspective of an immensely well-covered subject. Here as elsewhere in Larraín’s depictions, closely guarded secrets remain just that.

Maria. Directed by Pablo Larraín. Starring Angelina Jolie, Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Haluk Bilginer, Pierfrancesco Favino, and Caspar Phillipson. In select theatres in Canada from November 27 and streaming on Mubi from December 11.