Review: In 'Maria,' director Pablo Larrain completes his trilogy of tragic women, and Angelina Jolie finds in Maria Callas a legend worthy of her
In the melancholy biographical drama “Maria,” director Pablo Larrain and star Angelina Jolie don’t employ prosthetic makeup or other such effects to make the portrayal of the opera diva Maria Callas look convincing. They use the oldest bit of movie magic there is: Having a legend play a legend.
This biography could, in a way, fulfill Larrain’s trilogy of tragic women in 20th century history — after Natalie Portman’s Jacqueline Kennedy in “Jackie” and Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana in “Spencer.” In those films, as with “Maria,” Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight (who also wrote “Spencer”) use a brief period in the subject’s life to extrapolate a lifetime of sadness, regret and resilience.
The first scene takes place at the end, on Sept. 16, 1977, when Maria’s cook, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), and butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), find their boss on the floor of her sprawling Paris apartment, dead from a heart attack at age 53.
Larrain and Knight then backtrack one week. Maria is a faded version of herself, but no less imperious than in her prime. She orders Ferruccio to move her piano from room to room on a whim, even though his doctor has told him to take better care of his sore back. Maria’s doctor (Vincent Macaigne) wants to perform blood tests, which Maria refuses, though they both know what the results will show — that her liver is on the verge of failure after years of prescription drug abuse. She particularly dismisses the doctor’s warning that she should never attempt to sing again.
Though her once-spectacular voice is mostly gone at this point, she maintains the belief that she might again be able to take the stage. Larrain doesn’t present Maria as a Norma Desmond character, deluded that she’s still as alluring as she ever was. But the hope that she might perform again gives her hope, as does the encouragement of her rehearsal accompanist.
Also during this week, Maria permits a reporter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to interview her in a series of encounters, during which Larrain flashes back to Callas’ first marriage to industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini (Alessandro Bressanello) and her affair with the tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) — and how that affair ended, sort of, when Onassis set his sights on the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Larrain leaves unresolved the question of whether the interviews are real or imagined, though there’s a big hint in the reporter’s name, Mandrax, which was also a brand name for a sedative Callas was taking at the time.
Larrain moves fluidly from past to present, from memory to fantasy, and from Maria as a 50-something semi-retired Parisian to the glorious La Callas, enrapturing audiences around the world with her pristine voice. It takes a strong actor to keep up with those many facets of Maria Callas’ personality, and Jolie does so with grit and elegance. In fleeting moments does Jolie allow the La Callas mask to slip to reveal the flawed human being underneath, revealing a woman terrified of being passed by, left alone or forgotten — and it’s in those moments that “Maria” crystalizes the full portrait of this regal and flawed icon.
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‘Maria’
★★★1/2
Opens Wednesday, November 27, in theaters; streaming on Netflix starting December 11. Rated R for some language including a sexual reference. Running time: 124 minutes.