Maria Sings with a Strain in the Voice

Compared to the subjects of Pablo Larraín’s other movies about Great Women of the Twentieth Century, of which Maria is the third in a trilogy, Maria Callas is not quite the same level of household name -at least not in the American sphere. But Larraín is clearly as enamoured with the Greek opera titan as he is with the troubled English princess and the widowed American First Lady -whose second husband interestingly appears in this movie given the link of Aristotle Onassis carrying out an affair with Callas in the years before he married Jackie Kennedy (this movie in fact alleges it was Maria, not Jackie, who was the love of his life). Maria certainly casts its title character as on equal footing, in a cultural if not a political or social sense. The otherworldly beauty of her music is a constant theme that Larraín indulges, emphasizing the sheer emotional power of her voice and with that a kind of grandiose sense of her story to match.

Given this sensibility, she is played appropriately by Angelina Jolie, a grandiose figure in her own right. Maria is set largely at the end of her life in the 1970s in Paris, some years since she has performed publicly due to controversies around her significantly reduced weight and with that, perceptively, her breadth of vocal skill. She is attempting a comeback and as she does so, reflects on her life and career up to that point, particularly that relationship with Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) in the 1960s.

Larraín developed this movie conscious of its relationship to its predecessors. Like Jackie, a significant portion is framed as an interview with a young filmmaker (Kodi Smit-MchPhee) who may or may not be a manifestation of the angel of death. Like Spencer, her closest confidante in troubled times is a housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), alongside a fiercely loyal butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), a counterpart to Timothy Spall's menacing manservant in that film. And Larraín casts the same John F. Kennedy impersonator from Jackie (who incidentally also played the role in Blonde -the first of now two times that he's gotten to recreate Kennedy being serenaded by Marilyn Monroe). These familiar devices don't feel as striking here, curious though they indeed are; as rather than reveal Maria's character they more reinforce her loneliness, her mental instability, and the inevitability of her death -all of which were themes of those other movies too, Spencer especially, but not in so forthright a way.

Maria also can't help but feel thematically derivative, as the character's psyche -one so concerned with talent and star power and even a lost romance, is not so distinct as the kinds of complicated issues of public image and tragedy that Larraín's past heroines have had to contend with. That's not to say that Maria's issues are lesser, and indeed Jolie plays the toll of them with tremendous gravity, but we've seen them explored more in other films and in other ways about other women more assertively participants of celebrity culture. And the fact that the biggest part of her lingering emotional baggage is over that relationship with Onassis and it plays out in a very characteristic way, is underwhelming as well. There is a complex dynamic there, especially in how her relationship with him  so conflicted with her relationship to her music, but the profundity of it never quite comes across, and Larraín isn’t interested in developing it more concretely.

While this part of her life is so emphasized -showcasing the glamourous world she moved within, the film also does that biopic thing of trying to craft a story of triumph out of a situation that in truth did not have much of one. A particularly cogent example is 2019’s Judy, re-contextualizing a very dour moment in its subject’s life as a kind of affirming statement on their legacy. Maria prepares ardently for her big comeback, viewed as a way of her taking her own voice back after years of its co-opting by others. “My mother forced me to sing,” she says on the eve of this. “Onassis forbade me to sing; now I will sing for myself” -perhaps the most trite of this movie’s lines of dialogue. Larraín doesn’t hide the reception of this -in one scene a critic casually comments to her face how bad her performance was. But we are still meant to read her motivations as inherently noble; but in actuality they ring false.

Of course I can’t tell if her opera is meant to be bad -I don’t have the ear for it. But all through the movie it sounds very good, and in the late sequences near the end of the character’s life, the singing is actually done by Jolie herself (in flashbacks and records of earlier performances it is the real Callas being invoked). Jolie is pretty incredible here, her single greatest showcase in well over a decade, as she both epitomizes the manner of this elegant European high society stalwart, and pours her heart and soul into her emotional vulnerability. Jolie matches her subject's grace and also critically her maturity. It is the first time she has really channeled the pathos of age and experience -a late scene between Maria and her sister Yakinthi, played by Valeria Golino, is especially endemic of this. It is a performance much richer than the movie around it.

With that considered, Larraín really knows how to best incorporate Maria's operatic excellence into the texture of the movie, her singing underscoring and bringing gravitas to several scenes and montages, edited beautifully as film reels inserted into the movie's structure; an abstract glimpse into her relationship to her own memories, their reality as enigmatic as that of her interviewer. Larraín casts so much of the movie in a dim and fatalistic haze of mortality. At times it is brazenly reminiscent of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, albeit with a central character more aware of her fate and her legacy. His atmosphere relates some poignancy and it is not so dissimilar in effect to his other two movies. And yet it does not muster the same power.

The real shame in that is that Maria feels more personal for Larraín than either Jackie or Spencer. He empathizes with Maria Callas on a deeper level and has a pronounced love for her life and work. But he can't find as compelling an angle to come at her from, in spite of both his and Jolie's passion. It still has interesting layers, more in the late stages of life than the flashbacks. But it is a fragmented picture of Maria Callas for this, beholden to a narrative of sympathetic convention rather than one that is earnestly hers.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch