‘Maria’ Review: Angelina Jolie is a Woman Under the Influence in Pablo Larraín’s Minor Lietmotif | Venice

Even though he has been working in the biopic genre for a while now (NO, Neruda, Jackie, Spencer), Chilean director Pablo Larraín was under the spotlight as soon as it was announced that his latest project—about the legendary opera star Maria Callas—would be led by none other than Angelina Jolie some two years ago. Since then, we have been waiting with anticipation and a little bit of trepidation. Fourteen years since The Tourist (with two Maleficent films in between), Jolie graces the big screen once again in a dramatic, all-consuming role, and Larraín’s broad directorial strokes seem most fitting. Thanks to his local-to-global success and cunning approach to biographical dramas, the director has managed to assemble a Holy Trinity of actresses to mark his trilogy of misunderstood women: Natalie Portman as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie, Kristen Stewart as Diana Princess of Wales in Spencer, and now, Jolie in Maria. I give him that, he surely knows how to pick his leads, but thanks to Maria, we might have to reconsider the pure-hearted dedication Larraín’s films seemed replete with until now.

September 16th, 1977 was the day when legendary opera singer Maria Callas died of a heart attack after years of isolation in her Paris apartment and this is where Larraín’s Maria begins: with the tragedy. A mournful string score draws the camera in as it tracks into the vestibule of an opulent apartment. There, a piano stands in between a butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and a housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher), barely concealing a (rather small) body covered by a white sheet. The ornate walls seem to be grieving too. Then, the scene cuts to a lush black and white sequence of Callas (Jolie) in full splendor and filling up the frame completely – the pinned-up hairdo, the smoky eyes, the heavenly voice blasting through the screen at a volume that is both high and weirdly comforting – situates the film as a tribute. Look at her, the sequence says, that’s what she was: everything. 

The emphasis is clearly on the past tense and to indicate that, the film often resorts to black and white to portray intimate scenes of Callas’s private life and mark a bygone era of glory. Time and time again, with flashbacks, archive-like re-enactments, and spectral sequences of remembering, Maria tries to bring us closer to one woman’s distorted vision presented as the twilight of a grand life. We see her young in wartime poverty and later, in an ocean of admirers, including Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) who will do just about anything to make her his, even if that entails the loss of her voice. The film presents their affair quite diligently and in relation to Callas’s retreat from the stage, but it never really tries to dig into the ambivalences of that relationship. Or any other, for that matter. Maria’s sister Yakinthi (Valeria Golino) makes a brief appearance and their mother is mentioned in passing, but Larraín doesn’t seem that committed to what made the protagonist the way she is: lost.

It’s down to Carol cinematographer Edward Lachman to envelop Jolie—a face whose beauty any viewer is perhaps deeply familiar with—in a loving embrace, and there seems to be no one better suited to do this. Maria is more a paean to the American actress than to its titular character if only by virtue of the way the camera frames her; the ways it calibrates itself to Jolie’s cheekbones and the warmth of her gaze that is somehow both absent and grounding, even when she doesn’t address the viewer directly. But this is not a fetishizing gaze, on the contrary, it’s one that’s truly enamored with her command of the scene and boy, have we missed it. Larraín, conscious of the dramatic stakes that come with character admired to a degree of distortion (as it often happens with female stars of that caliber), decided to make the most out of it and introduce a meta-narrative of a camera (and a film) following Maria Callas’s last seven days on Earth. It transpires early on that La Divina is in poor mental and physical health and chooses to embrace some returning hallucinations, including one of a film crew and a young man interviewing her (Kodi Smit-McPhee). A clapper board announces Acts One, Two, and Three, each one accompanied by an increasingly ostentatious title, so the audience is well aware that there is a movie within the movie. While that meta-narrative plot device is intended to initiate the viewer into the rather desperate self-aggrandizing scenarios Callas sees herself in (“I come to restaurants to be admired,” she says at one point. “The stage is in my mind,” she declares on another occasion).

Penned by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Spencer), the script for Maria introduces the main character’s struggles, her wounds, weaknesses, and melancholy that—although embodied flawlessly by Jolie—insistently flatten the multiple dimensions that each visually stunning sequence opens up. Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes play a big part to the film’s sense of nostalgic grandeur, showcasing bits and pieces of the singer’s famed performances around the world as well as her assertive monochrome attire to accompany her on her lonely—and hallucination-fuelled—walks across Paris. Yes, the film is easy on the eye and obviously a pleasure to listen to – the textures of its images match the enchanting voice that soars, a feat for Jolie who spent seven months in opera training for that reason.

In Jackie, Larraín exteriorized a woman’s inner world, a jumble of repression and depression, for the first time after making male-centered films. While Spencer figuratively turned the royal body inside out, Maria tries to focus on the voice as an outlet or metaphor for all the pain endured by Callas. For that reason, the plot returns to a similar scene again and again, where Maria tries to sing and reclaim her voice, and while this set-up promises a poignant realization, Larraín prefers to shut it down without exploring the melodramatic potential to its fullest. Spencer worked best as a ghost story, but Maria feels kitschier and soulless in comparison. Instead of serving as a crescendo to the trilogy, this latest film exposes Larraín’s overall approach as one of a vain auteur, rather than a responsible storyteller, to the peril of three historically significant women.

Grade: C-

This review is from the 2024 Venice Film Festival where Maria had its world premiere and will next play the Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in the U.S. later this year.