Some fans call her “La Callas.” To friends, she’s simply “Maria.” But to everyone across the world, she’s one of the greatest voices ever to perform an opera.
The final days of Maria Callas receive a tragedy worthy of the diva who performed countless arias of heartache. Angelina Jolie stars as Callas and delivers a performance of operatic bravura in Maria. It’s her best work since her Oscar winning turn in Girl, Interrupted, if not her career. She gives a performance of soul-bearing madness and pushes herself beyond the risk-taking turns that defined the earliest stages of her career. (Not that she ever went on autopilot.)
It’s a testament to Jolie that she tackles a part that many cinephiles, this one included, long waited for Meryl Streep to play in what was reported to be the actor’s most coveted roles. And as a critic who considers Streep the finest screen actor, I must extend the highest compliment possible: it’s hard to imagine any actor exceeding the feat that Jolie performs here.
Maria marks the final entry in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s vivacious “women in heels” trilogy. After tackling Jackie O in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer, he pays tribute to a tragic heroine of popular culture. Maria admittedly marks the lesser of the three films, but the bar’s incredibly high with Jackie being this critic’s pick for the best film of 2016 and Spencer nearly topping the list for 2021. Moreover, Jackie and Spencer both earned Oscar nominations for Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart, respectively. Jolie deserves the same, and it’s high time the Academy gave this trilogy the recognition it deserves.
Like Jackie and Spencer, Maria offers shattering insight into the psychology of a complicated women. The film looks at the last week in Callas’s life as she roams the streets of Paris in runway-worthy couture and tries to recover her acclaimed voice. It largely unfolds in her grand Parisian apartment as she confides in her housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino). The latter is a lifelong confidante, her only real stable presence. They’re like an old married couple as he pesters Maria to see a doctor. She returns fires by instructing him to move the piano back and forth around the living room. She enquires about his fragile back, but playfully tos and fros about the heavy instrument’s placement in the flat.
As the piano scuttles about, Maria pops pills to ease her nerves. She takes a deadly cocktail of prescriptions to aid all sorts of ailments, but her drug of choice is Mandrax. The pill, known alternatively as Quaaludes, risks being her salvation and her downfall. It’s a gamble she’s willing to take, upping the dose and forgoing and meals (besides alcohol) to accompany the pills.
Mandrax further accompanies Maria when a journalist of the same name (Kodi Smit-McPhee) visits the apartment to do a story. The narrative device recalls the real-life interview frame of Jackie, but with a twist. It quickly becomes apparent that Mandrax is product of Maria’s Quaaludes-induced imagination. However, his presence affords Maria her one chance to be “real” as she sets her story straight before her time is up. The journalist accompanies her on a walking tour of Paris. As they traverse picturesque sights and intersect with elements of magical realism and cracks in the fourth wall, he asks her questions about greatest loves.
Maria’s elliptical storytelling weaves in memories of Callas’s grand affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). She plays hard to get with the rich playboy and breaks off her marriage to enjoy the high life in the Greek tycoon’s yacht. It’s a reversal of fortune for the Greek-American soprano whose mother sells her voice and body in flashback scenes. Men are Maria’s Achilles’ heel, so to speak, but Onassis is her only love that rivals the stage.
The love story fuels some epic rivalries as Callas has a telling encounter with President Kennedy. She defies his offer for friendship, instead noting the irony of two parties meeting in a restaurant while their spouses are nowhere to be found. The narrative bridge between Callas, the Kennedys, and Onassis offers one of the fetching connective tissues that bring Larraín’s trilogy full circle. The script by Steven Knight, who wrote Spencer but not Jackie, loosely ties the divas together thematically. These figures don’t exist in vacuums.
If there’s a telling difference between Maria and her predecessors, though, it’s that Callas simply lacks the cultural mythology that makes Diana and Jackie so rich for re-reading. Her story, captured previously in the essential documentary Maria by Callas, is one of the ultimate diva. Although Callas obviously resisted the label, the moniker feels doubly apt with this portrayal. The film shows how Callas absorbed adulation and adored the spotlight. Key scenes see her hunker down at a Parisian bistro table simply to be recognized by passersby, and Jolie’s own star status brilliantly infiltrates Callas’s ability to command attention. The part demands Jolie capture Callas’s luminous presence and tempestuous spirit with equal measure.
That act inviting onlookers backfires somewhat for Maria, though, as one man confronts her about one of the many concerts she cancelled for illness. The cancellations are the stuff as legend as Callas’s chronic poor health precipitated her downfall by making her an unbookable talent.
Maria offers a reclamation of that narrative as Callas seeks to overcome her various ailments and sing again with full voice. In these arias, too, Larraín nimbly weaves past, present, and fantasy as Callas regains her former glory, if only in her mind. The golden cinematography by Edward Lachman matches Jolie’s elegance, while the editing by Sofia Supercaseaux weaves the many facets of Callas into a complex psychological piece as fragments of fantasy, reality, past, and present collide with operatic power.
These vocal lessons afford an actor’s showpiece for Jolie as she performs the soprano’s showstopping numbers, albeit with some cracks and quivers. Jolie enacts the performances with gusto. She is vein-poppingly emotive as Callas commits every cell in her body towards conveying the passion of each song. Doctors say that singing will kill her, but Maria, thin as she is, accepts the adage about knowing when it’s over. With Maria, Larraín’s trilogy goes out with its heels on – as only Maria would have it.
