Here we go again.
In Hollywood’s ongoing cheerless attempts to contest the joy of music by cutting stellar classical musicians down to size, “Maria” joins the curt parade of “Tár” and “Maestro.” The new biopic of Maria Callas follows the takedowns of fictional conductor Lydia Tár and larger-than-life Leonard Bernstein with a dramatization of the most compelling singer I’ve ever encountered — live, on recording, on video anywhere. (I’m hardly alone in this estimation.) All three films have this in common: Over-the-top musicians are tragically brought down by their own hubris and turn monstrous. Each is a victim of her or his celebrity — something celebrity-incubating Hollywood happens to be pretty good at.
“Maria,” which began streaming on Netflix this week, focuses on Callas’ reclusive last years when she was, if you care to believe this account, pitifully self-destructive. She had lost her voice and her lover, and she had nothing to live for. She could not recapture the mythic La Callas nor make peace with the woman, Maria. It’s an ignominious tale of woe and quixotic temperament.
The gloomy film begins and ends with Callas’ solitary death. In typical flashback fashion, we witness her decline and delusions as she tries to recapture her voice, the attentions of Aristotle Onassis and the adoration of the public. Flashbacks mix in bits and pieces of documentary footage, glimpsing a few highlights of her life.
Throughout, the improbable Angelina Jolie captures Callas’ style in her dress, her public manner and her movements. She sports to glossy perfection sensational ‘50s and ‘60s hairdos. She’d make a great plastic doll of Callas.
The real Callas was striking in a different way. Her face didn’t have Jolie’s spectacularly exact proportions. In fact, Callas made herself out of what she considered to be an ugly duckling. When she first appeared onstage in the late 1940s, she immediately demonstrated a voice to be reckoned with and a fervent vocal theatricality. But she was a large woman and said to be somewhat awkward onstage. Director Franco Zeffirelli described her as big in every way — big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big body — and compared her to the Statue of Liberty.
Seeing the 1953 film “Roman Holiday” made Callas determined to look like its diminutive star, Audrey Hepburn. Callas lost 80 pounds in a single year. She had already been working with great directors, especially Luchino Visconti, but now she had the physical means to go much further and invent the modern concept of opera as drama. Her voice had lost some of its sheen, and those who disliked her blamed the weight loss, which wasn’t the case. It was, instead, her compulsion to put all of her being into a raging theatrical intensity.
On the surface, Callas had become an icon of elegance, but now she could make her big eyes, big mouth and big voice penetrate like nothing anyone in opera had ever experienced. She transformed not just herself but the art form.
Callas’ career in opera lasted less than two decades and was over by 1965. She was only 42 when she sang her last staged opera performance, a production of “Tosca” at Covent Garden in London. People came up with all kinds of reasons why her voice went so early. Only after her death 12 years later did we learn that she suffered from dermatomyositis, which causes muscle weakness that can affect the vocal chords and likely also led to her heart failure at age 53.
Jolie’s voice has been slightly mixed with Callas’ in such a way that it ever so slightly sanitizes Callas’. Joile’s speaking voice sounds almost like Callas’ but without the hint of Callas’ New York accent. She lacks, crucially, Callas’ disarming smile. None of this might matter so much had director Pablo Larrain concentrated less on supplying glamour shots of Jolie.
The film is called “Maria” for a reason. Callas’ was, indeed, a life of conflicts between the artist who grandly became La Callas and the woman who was Maria. But you need to understand both. She undoubtedly stopped singing because of her physical condition. Still, her greatness gave her a remarkable capacity for transcending biology. Yet her need to become more of the woman she wanted to be drove her obsession with the ultimately toxic Onassis.
I saw just how exceptional the transcendent part of this complex equation could be in her 1974 ill-fated comeback tour with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. A graduate student at the time, I had a top balcony seat at War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. The acoustics are best up there, and I bought a pair of opera glasses just to see her.
She sounded pretty bad. The voice was gone. But not the intensity, not the presence. This became, in fact, some of the greatest singing I’ve ever encountered. She seemed at the same time superhuman and a super-suffering human. You cannot possibly experience the wizardry of Callas and the music becoming one on the awful underground recordings of the concert found on YouTube and elsewhere.
Better to watch Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film “Medea,” in which Callas stars in a purely acting role. Like Larrain with Jolie, Pasolini was fascinated by Callas’ face, particularly her nose. He scrutinizes her expressivity, its extraordinary power. She no longer needs opera, it’s inside her. Pasolini uses music as though he were filming a Noh play but with masks off. The fact that this film has so little regard in the opera world and even among Callas fanciers demonstrates how, if you pay close enough attention, she remains ahead of her time.
Her radical sophistication and courage were in further evidence in 1974 when she addressed a Verdi musicology conference in Chicago. She appeared dignified, eloquent, unsentimental and downright revolutionary. She had no need to waste her time with musicologists and their talk of neglected early Verdi masterpieces. Knowing what mattered and what didn’t, she suggested that they take the best bits from those operas and make something modern and meaningful. She also blamed Puccini for making singers and audiences lazy, because he wasn’t challenging enough.
A year later, Onassis died, which it is said to have caused Callas to lose interest in life. He had left Callas, whom he never married, to wed Jacqueline Kennedy, but the flame burned in Callas to the end. Her last two years were obviously very difficult, what with drugs, depression and dermatomyositis, all of which come across as tawdry in “Maria.” I wonder whether she became a recluse in part because patients suffering from dermatomyositis are supposed to stay out of sunlight. Her body was failing her.
A more affectionate and fanciful portrait of Callas in those years is the basis of Zeffirelli’s 2002 biopic, “Callas Forever,” starring Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons as her agent. Zeffirelli had worked with Callas and knew her well. To best understand Callas, turn to Tony Palmer’s 2007 documentary “Callas,” in which Zeffirelli is particularly illuminating.
All the adoration, the glamour, the high life was, for Callas, a purposeful life of bread and roses. Rather, her art had always been the way she boldly filled such emptiness with incredible meaning. “Maria,” on the other hand, offers little more than pathos and poses.
