“The fact that Jolie delivers a powerhouse performance while embodying a reserved and measured, if frequently acerbic woman is a testament to her strength as an actress.”

One stab at ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ puts the writing on the wall: the magic is gone from the voice of Maria Callas, soprano extraordinaire. In her last days she has lost control over the one thing that should have put her in control over the rest of her life, if it weren’t for the people in her life denying her that chance. From enchanting an SS officer with La bohème for a couple of drachmae early in her life in Greece, to enrapturing the historic La Scala opera house with a thunderous ‘mad scene’ from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena in her final days, La Divina, La Diva, La Callas, or simply Maria reflects on her life and career while bossing around her crooked butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and mousy housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). She mostly leads a withdrawn existence in her sumptuous Paris apartment, which more and more starts to feel like a tomb. A journey past the highlights (on stage) and the low points (the rest of her life) framed by a week-long interview session with a young journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) paints the portrait of a woman who, despite her success, never truly was capable of stepping out of the shadow of being ‘the voice’. A tempestuous but long-lasting relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) put a large mark on her life, a shadow that hung over her even after his death in 1975. Scandals, allegations of faking illness to get out of performances, and general diva behavior gave Callas the reputation of being a prima donna, and at the time of her death in September 1977 she was mostly regarded as a has-been, adulation to her face changing to whispers behind her back.

It is her death that marks the start of Maria, Pablo Larraín’s portrait of the opera singer, the final third in his ‘caged birds’ trilogy after Jackie (about Jackie Kennedy, whose own ties to Onassis get her several mentions here; sadly no cameo by Natalie Portman) and the Lady Di biopic Spencer. Although Callas on the surface seems the least like a bird trapped in a golden cage, the recurring references to a songbird already hint at the protected life of Callas, largely on account of Onassis controlling it. When you dig a little deeper, a life full of people never refusing you anything, never telling you ‘no’, is a life of entrapment too. For all her diva behavior and the ways she denigrates her personal staff, it is clear that the human connection they provide is what she most reveres; a late scene in which the threesome of Callas, Ferruccio, and Bruna play cards turns heartbreaking when the Callas façade suddenly breaks and shows Maria’s warmth and love for the two people most loyal to her.

After the opening death, the aftermath of which bookends the film, Maria skips back a week to the start of the interview series that will lead us past the defining moments (a simple device that does not really work, and also seems to leave Smit-McPhee nonplussed about what to do with the part). It shows a tormented soul who drew up a wall of seeming arrogance to shield herself from the pain left behind by the rocky marriage of her parents and the embitterment of her mother. In a sense her own relationship with Onassis is a mirror image of that of her parents, a tragedy in and of itself. The film also shows a lonely and unhappy woman, a result of what reveals itself as another layer of bars on her cage: the extraordinary gift of her voice utterly defining her as a person to the point where she was the voice and nothing else. As Callas herself once said, to music critic and personal friend John Ardoin, “It’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.” Or perhaps it is even better verbalized by her movie version, who says to John F. Kennedy, “We have an incredible place in this world, but we can’t get away from it.“

Which brings us to a woman also blessed with an extraordinary gift, and who in a world in which celebrity has become even more of a curse than in Callas’ time is also defined more by what she does than who she is as a person: Angelina Jolie. In her first truly big dramatic role in over a decade, Jolie has the challenging task of playing a true icon as well as a tormented and oftentimes very difficult woman. She succeeds completely, oscillating between Callas’ prickly nature as a person and an employer, and her vulnerability and loneliness in the quieter moments. It is in particular these moments that show the immensity of Jolie’s talent, when all she needs is ‘a face and a gaze’ to channel a myriad of emotions running through Callas’ head. Jolie’s immersion into the role is evident in the vocal performances in which the actress does most of the singing herself, the result of months of training as an opera singer. Obviously Jolie is no Callas, so in flashbacks to a more successful era the performances feature Callas’ unique voice, but the scenes in the present are mostly Jolie’s (with a little bit of Callas mixed in), a perfect way to show the diva’s withering voice in the final days of her life; to the untrained ear it still sounds pretty good, but those with a bit more experience notice the lack of power and richness of tone and color in the voice. The fact that Jolie delivers a powerhouse performance while embodying a reserved and measured, if frequently acerbic woman is a testament to her strength as an actress. The rest of the cast fade into the background a bit, but for the two largest supporting roles by Favino and Rohrwacher as Callas’ closest confidants and most dedicated friends Ferruccio and Bruna this is a boon, given that they both play obedient servants who truly love the woman they work for despite being bullied on a daily basis. Especially Favino is excellent and playing largely against type as the shuffling butler who has to, as a running gag, continuously move a piano from one room to another.

Jolie’s performance also threatens to outshine the rest of the film, in part because she is on screen in virtually every shot, but also because through the plethora of flashbacks the film has a scattershot nature, compounded by Larraín bringing a wide variety of cinematographic choices to the table; he goes through black-and-white sequences as easily as through grainy, Kodak-like footage and more modern-looking footage. As per usual with Larraín’s films, visually Maria doesn’t disappoint, but the cascade of visual styles conjures up memories of that biopic of another icon, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde; while the effect is not as dizzying and certainly has more thought behind it than in Dominik’s film, Larraín’s frequent style switching does make the film restless and opens it up for critiques (unfairly, but to be expected from some corners) of looking like a perfume ad, especially with the frequent use of opera fragments. These specific fragments, in which we often switch between Jolie in the present and Jolie in recreated stage performances from her glory days, create a link between the tragic characters Callas played in the operas she performed and the tragedy of her own life, which in this cinematic universe metaphorically ends in the same way most of her opera heroines did.

Despite the disorienting effect of some of Larraín’s choices, Maria is a more accessible film than Jackie or Spencer, largely because it follows the pattern and tropes of a standard biopic far more than those other two films did. Also, whereas both those films were driven by an atmosphere of dread and paranoia, Maria mainly runs on an aura of sadness and loneliness, which are easier to digest emotions for general audiences, and far less suffocating. With Netflix having just acquired the US rights to the film, the question arises whether streaming is the best outlet (although there surely will be an Oscar-qualifying limited theater run), given that the many opera scenes really need a theater setting to truly come into their own, but the film should run less risk of being prematurely ended by casual viewers than the earlier films. Despite Callas being incredibly gifted and unique, the emotions at play here are relatable and easy to empathize with, not in the least because of Jolie’s strong performance. If Larraín could have reined in his more excessive tendencies this might have been a masterpiece, but as it stands Maria is a powerful portrait of a woman who at the end of her life has finally taken control, but lost it over the one thing that defined her.

(c) Image copyright: Pablo Larraín