You don’t have to be a opera fan to appreciate Maria Callas. She was a captivating figure—bold yet vulnerable—whose life was filled with drama. Her voice was a symphony of emotions, a reflection of paradise before the fall of Adam and Eve. Her beauty was a captivating mix of mythical allure and mischievous charm, as if sculpted by the gods’ chief caricaturist. Her mismatched features, the commanding nose, and the almond-shaped eyes, harmonized into a captivating blend of classical perfection.
If you could only choose one opera singer to admire, Callas is the one—she’s more than enough. It’s no wonder Pablo Larraín, known for his films about troubled women, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2016’s Jackie) and Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer), was drawn to her story. In Maria—screening at the 81st Venice Film Festival—Angelina Jolie portrays La Diva Callas in the final days of her life, in 1977 Paris. Like a gothic ghost, she glides through her lavish apartment, adorned with gilded accents and brocade fabrics, enveloped in fairytale dressing gowns. Her sustenance consists solely of the sedative Mandrax, which she consumes in copious quantities. She has abandoned performing and almost ceased singing, though a comeback lingers in her mind: she stands at the entrance to her kitchen and commands her devoted housekeeper Bruna (the consistently brilliant Alba Rohrwacher) to listen and respond as she attempts an aria. Bruna, dutifully and kindly, offers the reassurance Maria desires, despite the shaky and pale quality of her voice, a mere shadow of its former glory. On a whim, Maria also instructs her other loyal servant, Ferruccio (played by the remarkable Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino), to move her piano from one end of the apartment to the other; in the next breath, she inquires about his back pain. It’s all part of the daily routine for Bruna and Ferruccio. Maria is their own lovable, troubled tyrant.
Throughout the film, Jolie’s Maria gazes into the distance, mourning the person, the presence, the artist she once was, reflecting on her one true love, the “ugly and dead”—as she describes him. (When he appears in the movie’s flashback scenes, a cunning gnome in evening dress, he’s played by Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer.) Every gesture Jolie makes is tragic and trembling; when she smiles, it’s a wan, magnanimous smile, as if she couldn’t be bothered. This performance belongs to the “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” school of acting, a great artist’s final days portrayed with a self-conscious polish that has nothing to do with the inherent grandeur, or sadness, of Callas’s life.
The blame doesn’t lie solely with Jolie: Maria is a film made with great respect, bordering on adoration, but lacking in genuine feeling. This isn’t to say Larraín lacks empathy for his subjects; oh, how he loves his suffering ladies! It’s just that he fails to translate those feelings into anything beyond tasteful, mannered kitsch. In Jackie, Natalie Portman worked tirelessly to capture both her subject’s aloofness and her guarded sorrow, despite the film’s clever-arty filmmaking. And in Spencer, Kristen Stewart, one of the most original young actors of our time, portrayed Diana as a deeply tragic figure, which is not the same as portraying a person. The film’s most memorable scene involves its lonely heroine’s symbolic consumption of a pearl necklace. The point, if the message isn’t clear enough, is that poor Diana was so hungry for food, for love, for everything. Larraín has his loyal fans, and admirers of Jackie and Spencer may adore Maria. But to me, Larraín’s supposedly sympathetic psychological portraits are the cinematic equivalent of Madame Alexander dolls lined up on a dresser: extremely pretty, but not meant to be touched.
I acknowledge that this is the point. These are intentionally stylized exercises, designed to appear inventive and extreme. However, their fussiness is exhausting. The plot of Maria revolves around an extended visit from a TV interviewer—is he real or imagined? Does it matter?—whose name, not coincidentally, is Mandrax. (He’s played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.) Dear Ferruccio, desperately trying to get Maria off the pills, warns her that Mandrax—both the man and the drug—is not her friend, but to no avail. She confides her deepest secrets to Mandrax, including one involving her craggy, unfaithful lover Onassis, who abruptly left her for that other Larraín doll-subject, Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas read about their marriage in the newspapers, and as Jolie’s Maria reveals this truth, something cracks within her—it’s the only genuinely moving sequence in the film. However, for the most part, Maria focuses on telling, not showing. “I am quite rebellious by nature!” Maria informs the awestruck Mandrax, surveying him coolly through her Nefertiti-like eyes. It’s just one of the film’s many lines of dialogue drawn from the You Don’t Say? catalog. (The screenplay is by Steven Knight, who also wrote Spencer.)
There’s much to admire in Maria, if admiration is what you seek. Jolie trained diligently to perform her own singing; at times, her voice and Callas’s voice are blended together, in varying proportions, into a single track. It all sounds acceptable—though you might feel a shiver when Callas’s voice dominates the mix. The film is visually stunning, thanks to the exceptional cinematography of Stéphane Fontaine, as well as production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. Jolie gets to wear some fabulous 1970s-luxe attire, including several sleek tunic-and-pants ensembles and a regal, fur-trimmed brocade dressing gown/evening coat combo. Callas had impeccable style and wore her clothes beautifully—Maria captures that aspect accurately.
Larraín doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of Callas’s life. Her mother reportedly forced her and her sister to “entertain” German and Italian soldiers during the Axis occupation of Greece; Larraín dramatizes one such incident with skill and discretion. Yet, despite this, Maria fails to capture the spirit of Callas. Jolie portrays her subject as haughtily cool and deeply insecure, but misses her commanding charisma. Callas could be demanding, but it was all part of her unwavering self-discipline: she believed in her talent above all else. And there was a radiant aura of joy around her, which made her vulnerability all the more poignant. Larraín does his film no favors by using footage of the real Maria Callas in the closing credits sequence: To see her laughing as she sang, with her whole being, or even just to catch her lost in troubled thought, is to experience a jolt of all the vitality that Jolie and Larraín have failed to capture. Callas, at only 53, was larger than life. Maria may embellish her legend. But it also extinguishes her spark.