‘Maria’ Review: Angelina Jolie’s Maria Callas Suffers at a Chilly Distance in Pablo Larraín’s Biopic

In Jackie and Spencer, Pablo Larraín removed any trace of starch from the historical bio-drama to examine, with penetrating intimacy, famous women in moments of extreme emotional distress played out in the glare of a global spotlight. Intimacy is the key factor lacking in the third part of the gifted Chilean director’s unofficial trilogy, Maria. Starring Angelina Jolie as revered operatic soprano Maria Callas over the final week of her life in Paris, the movie is like a glittering jewel in a glass showcase, inviting you to look but not touch.

That doesn’t mean it’s uninvolving or that Jolie’s technically precise interpretation isn’t impressive. But there’s a meta collision between a star whose celebrity has long eclipsed her acting achievements, making it all but impossible for her to disappear into a character, and a subject who constructed an imperious persona for herself, performing even when she wasn’t on a stage.

Doubling down on icons brings a lot of weight for a role to bear. It results less in a kinship between actor and character than a twofold remove — an exercise in character study, a tad glacial and distancing, rather than a flesh-and-blood portrait.

The movie is beautifully crafted, of course, graced with sumptuous visuals from the great Ed Lachman. The cinematographer captures the City of Light in 1977 in soft autumnal shades highly evocative of the period and shifts into black-and-white or grainy color stock for Callas’ many retreats into memory. Lachman, who was Oscar-nominated for his breathtaking chiaroscuro work on Larraín’s last feature, El Conde, shot Maria using a textured mix of 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm, along with vintage lenses.

The DP’s outstanding work enhances the refined contributions of production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. The latter’s stunning gowns include chic ensembles worn at public occasions and exquisite costumes for Callas’ famed stage roles, some of which the singer is seen burning as she separates herself from the past.

“I’m in the mood for adulation,” Callas tells a Paris waiter when he suggests she might be more comfortable inside than at an outdoor café table. “I come to restaurants to be adored.”

Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight, who previously penned Spencer, comply to a degree. Their film is an act of mournful worship for a diva who seems almost too arch, too cloaked in affectation to read as a vulnerable human being — even as her body is shutting down and she’s racked with insecurities about her voice while planning to sing again, more than four years after she last performed. Often, it feels like the filmmakers are scrutinizing Callas with the disorienting effect of a magnifying glass.

The balance doesn’t seem quite right when you feel more for the loyal household staff who love and protect her than you do for the woman lying dead on the carpet by the grand piano. That image opens the movie, preceded only by a slow pan around Callas’ stately apartment.

Knight employs the pedestrian framing device of an interview, with a TV arts reporter and cameraman coming to Maria’s home. The journalist’s name, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee in a thankless role), is a tipoff that he’s a product of Maria’s mind given that it’s also the name of the medication on which she’s most dependent — more commonly sold as Quaaludes in the U.S.

In what seems a ritual maintained for some time, Maria’s hyper-vigilant butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), removes the pills from her dressing table and later from the handbags and coat pockets where she has stashed handfuls of them around the room. She has also stopped eating for days at a time, feeding meals prepared by her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) to her poodles.

She becomes peevish about the dire warnings of her medic, Dr. Fointainebleau (Vincent Macaigne), that her heart and liver are completely shot and that the stress of attempting to perform plus the meds she would need to get through it risk killing her.

The dominant thread becomes not that grim final week, punctuated by abortive rehearsals with a gently coaxing accompanist (Stephen Ashfield), but the singer’s mental forays into her past, from her unhappy childhood with an exploitative mother (Lydia Koniordou) through her love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), whose aggressive charms instantly shoved her husband to the sidelines. Since the Greek shipping magnate eventually left her for Jackie Kennedy, there’s a satisfying full-circle completion with the subject of Larraín’s first film in the trilogy. But don’t expect a cameo from Jackie star Natalie Portman.

Maria’s memories are additionally crowded with her triumphs in the world’s most prestigious opera houses — Covent Garden, The Met, La Scala — flooding the movie with glorious music. The naked emotionality and piercing tragedy of the immortal operatic heroines is a poignant fit for Callas’ end-of-life story and a useful counterpoint to her studied poise and aloofness in this interpretation. The power of work by Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, Donizetti, Catalani and Cherubini goes a long way toward delivering the pathos that often seems muted by Larraín’s approach.

Passages from some of the most celebrated classical operas effectively supplant the role of a score. The soul-stirring choice of musical bookends for the film starts with Desdemona’s supplicant prayer, “Ave Maria,” from Otello, and closes with “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca, in which a woman who lived for art and love feels abandoned by God. Opera enthusiasts will find much here to savor when the movie drops on Netflix at a date to be determined.

Commendably, Jolie undertook more than six months of rigorous vocal training for the part, also working on breathing and posture alongside specifics like accent. The singing we hear in Maria is a synthesized mix of star and subject. Arias from her prime are predominantly Callas recordings, but her voice in the 1977 scenes, older and rustier after years of vocal strain and a long absence from the stage, blends in a significant amount of Jolie. Neither lip-syncing nor karaoke, it’s a more intricate hybrid.

A number of striking moments use music to show memory and fantasy bleeding into Callas’ diminishing hold on reality. For instance, Maria strolling through the city with the Eiffel Tower in the background, in her mind marshaling a crowd of everyday Parisians singing the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore; or a full orchestra on the steps of one of the French capital’s grand historic buildings, playing in the rain while a throng of costumed geishas perform the “Humming Chorus” from Madama Butterfly. That ineffably moving passage of music, representing Butterfly’s calm vigil as she waits for Pinkerton’s return, adds emotional heft to the tragedy looming in Maria’s life.

Conflict surfaces when a music reporter for Le Figaro pulls a dirty trick and then confronts Maria outside the rehearsal auditorium with the view that her voice is irreparably ragged. But Knight’s script doesn’t capitalize on this as a moment of self-reckoning, instead limiting the scene to a distressing invasion of privacy.

The movie aims to depict a celebrated woman, whose life has been as much about sacrifice as reward, seeking to take control, to look back and see the truth as death approaches. But its moments of illumination are hazy. There’s little that comes close to the compassion and insight Larraín brought to his portraits of Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, even though it’s very much of a piece with those movies.

The tenderness of a scene in which Maria’s sister (Valeria Golino) urges her to put her troubled childhood behind her (“Close the door, little sister”) inadvertently points up how few opportunities we are given to get on comparably intimate terms with the protagonist.

In fact, the most heartbreaking moment for me came at the end, when the film returns to the day of Callas’ death from a heart attack, aged just 53. A high-pitched shriek that at first sounds like some strangled note from an aria is revealed to have come from one of her poodles, the dog’s cry of anguish becoming a loud expression of the hushed sorrow shown by Ferruccio and Bruna (Favino and Rohrwacher are both wonderful) as they reach for each other’s hand for comfort.

Still, Maria is a far more daring and unconventional take on the final chapter of the legendary soprano’s life than Franco Zeffirelli’s boilerplate 2002 biopic, Callas Forever, starring Fanny Ardant. And Larraín’s film becomes retroactively more affecting when the lovely archival images of Callas over the end credits, full of vitality at the peak of her career, widen the perspective on her sad, accelerated decline.