By Alissa Wilkinson
There is a moment, a little way into “Maria,” when you realize it shares a cinematic universe with another of director Pablo Larraín’s recent films. This movie’s main character is celebrated opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie). In a flashback rendered in monochrome, we see the night she met the absurdly wealthy business magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) — and he’s the future husband, we know, of Jackie Kennedy, who was the subject of Larraín’s 2016 film “Jackie.” Onassis, still married to his previous wife, claims he’s fallen in love with Callas through his opera glasses and invites her and her husband aboard his yacht; she seems lightly amused and a little irritated. “There’s a point where self-confidence becomes a kind of insanity,” she tells him.
Obviously that “cinematic universe” is just reality: Famous people know other famous people and go to the same parties and fall in love with one another. Callas and Onassis spent nine years together before he left her for the widowed Jackie Kennedy. But in this case, the link reminds the viewer that Larraín has made a better movie in his so-called diva trilogy — two better ones, actually. In “Jackie,” Natalie Portman played the bereaved first lady as she carefully crafted a legend out of her assassinated husband’s legacy. “Spencer,” which came out in 2021, was not good — but it was interesting, starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in the throes of a Christmastime existential crisis.
Yet “Maria” is a bit of a slog, even for an opera lover (like me). Callas here is at the end of her life, and she is not well. She lives in Paris with her long-suffering butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher), lies to them about how many pills she’s taking, and hallucinates enough of her day that she qualifies as an unreliable narrator. Her longing for Onassis, or perhaps her visions of him, is one narrative thread in “Maria.” Here are some others: her need for adulation; her fading voice; her addiction to various prescription drugs; her obsessive proclivity for ordering her butler to move the piano around her home; her slip-sliding memory; her refusal to listen to anyone’s advice other than her own; her almost pathological insistence on dying for her art.
This is, in other words, about the sun setting over a once-shining prima donna, a woman who wowed the world with her voice and then faded from view. The movie skips over most of her scandals, flashing back to performances on the world’s great stages and, even earlier, in her youth (Aggelina Papadopoulou plays the young Callas). Those performances are sumptuously staged, as are several dreamlike sequences involving choruses and orchestras on the streets of Paris, in one case performing “Madama Butterfly” in the pouring rain. There’s no lack of effort here. Jolie trained for seven months to sing some of the music, and while she is lip-syncing to some of Callas’ famous performances, she is completely immersed in all of it.
Oddly, though, Callas remains almost wholly opaque. Dim flashes of the past suggest some trauma, but it all feels disjointed, and not on purpose. True, each movie in Larraín’s trilogy concerns itself far more with psychological portraiture than with filling in the facts. These are not biopics in any meaningful sense, and in general, that’s good. The point isn’t to learn about the women, but to inhabit them at their most vulnerable moments.
Yet “Spencer” and “Jackie” both used their subjects to explore something else: the way myths are crafted, or the way privilege becomes a prison. Their casting was part of it — Portman’s own careful image-making throughout her career, Stewart’s years of being trapped inside the Hollywood celebrity machine before she kicked down the doors.
But “Maria,” from a screenplay by “Spencer” writer Steven Knight, cannot find the story inside either its subject or its star. Jolie is committed, but the camera spends almost all its time observing her unendingly desperate expression at close range. Callas, meanwhile, is mournful and imperious, ordering people around, refusing to do anything she doesn’t want to do. That is not insight; it’s just mood. She fantasizes near-constantly about the world shaping itself around her, bending to her whims, whole crowds falling at her feet, which eventually provokes the same exhaustion that her loyal staff pretends not to feel. A documentary filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) named Mandrax (a name he shares, suspiciously, with her sedative of choice) shows up repeatedly, presumably to provide her a reason to remember and talk about her past. But nothing of note is revealed.
The effect is that “Maria” feels like a portrait of the artist as narcissist, someone who insists on martyring herself on a pyre nobody asked her to climb. It’s hard to imagine this was the filmmakers’ intention. They know Callas lived a fascinating life, was a fascinating woman. There’s plenty to work with here. Perhaps the larger-than-life diva refused ultimately to be carefully read. But what we get here isn’t interesting, and it’s not told in an interesting way. Maybe Callas’ warning to Onassis explains the problem: There’s a point at which self-confidence becomes a kind of insanity.
‘Maria’: Rated R for drug and alcohol use and some bad behavior. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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