‘Maria’ Review: Angelina Jolie is Bewitching as La Callas in Pablo Larraín’s Delicate Depiction of the Diva | NYFF

Maria Callas was comfortable with death. As the greatest soprano alive, she died on stage night after night at La Scala, Covent Garden, The Met, and in Venice in front of hundreds of people eager to be transported by the power of La Callas. Opera (and its audience) has always had a dark fascination with the diva’s end, usually in dramatic fashion (Mimi in La Bohème and Violetta in La Traviata come to mind). It’s fitting, then, that Pablo Larraín’s final entry in his trilogy of the beautiful and the doomed, Maria, begins at the end–specifically, on September 16, 1977, the day Maria Callas died of a heart attack in Paris. The film doesn’t begin with the expected high drama of death, though. Instead, the camera floats slowly through the dusty light of an opulent apartment like a ghost, a white sheet on the floor with a body underneath, obscured by an armchair and a piano. Maria feels like a specter in her own quarters, surveying the small crowd gathered around the scene, introducing the film’s complex, layered exploration of her own interiority.

The film flashes back one week when an ailing Maria (Angelina Jolie) seems to know that her end is right around the corner. However, that doesn’t stop her from trying to mount a small comeback. In fact, knowing that the end is nigh seems to inspire her even more to try to salvage any bit of her voice that she may have left. Her vocal decline is a mystery to the public, and Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight (Spencer) largely keep it so, allowing Maria herself to reveal details of her triumphs and struggles. Desperate to find La Callas again, Maria performs to an audience of two: her housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino). Here, the film establishes its delicate and playful use of sound and music, alternating between diegetic and non-diegetic opera. As Maria sings to Bruna in her kitchen, we hear a mix of Jolie’s vocals (she trained for nearly seven months for the role) and Callas’ actual performances that Maria envisions as she tries to resurrect her gifts buried deep within. As cinematographer Ed Lachman (Carol, El Conde) brings an early performance to life in vivid detail, the camera cuts back to Callas singing in a much humbler, more intimate venue while Bruna flips her omelet, the sharp, humorous sizzle recalling Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Bruna, with a deep sadness in her eyes (she knows Maria won’t eat the omelet), tells her she sounds “magnificent.” These sequences don’t operate as standard flashbacks and instead blur the line between the past and the present. Here, Jolie brilliantly creates a stark contrast between Maria’s vocal abilities at the height of her powers and in the final week of her life while also depicting the deep sadness of a woman grappling with her art and her perceived inability to make it.    

Like Larraín’s earlier entries, Jackie and Spencer, Maria sets its gaze on a small window of time in its heroine’s life, breaking open any preconceived ideas that audiences might have while utilizing the genre best befitting the leading lady. In Jackie, Larraín pushed the boundary and tempted feelings of voyeurism fitting America’s fascination with Kennedy’s assassination, investigating how the woman in the blood-stained pink suit might react to an event that spawned a dozen conspiracy theories. In Spencer, a gothic haunted house tale set at Christmas, he played with English tradition in a biting, unexpected way to reflect Diana’s inner turmoil and the cloistering effect of centuries of royal entrapment. In Maria, Larraín uses the structure and genre conventions of opera and 1960s and ‘70s cinema, allowing the character to express her inner thoughts and emotions freely while referencing the great art of her lifetime. Larraín’s illustrations of Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, and now Maria Callas also steer clear of the classic (and overdone) cradle-to-grave tales of beautiful women dying. Instead, he uses details from the time and a focused, first-person perspective to open a window of empathy to the viewer. For Jackie and Diana, their iconography, connected by tragic car accidents and partnerships with Chanel, meant that they already existed in the viewers’ minds. Maria Callas is, by no means, an obscure figure, but it’s also fair to say that she doesn’t have the same cultural gravitas with broad audiences that the other films’ subjects possess. And while Portman and Stewart certainly have had their own complicated relationships with celebrity and the public, their experiences never eclipsed those of the women they were portraying, allowing them to feel like fresh interpretations of each character, with light touches of meta-commentary surrounding each woman as a modern celebrity. Casting Jolie as Maria Callas is, on the surface, fitting of this tradition, but her own relationship with the tabloids allows the audience to empathize not only with Maria Callas but also with the actress’ former and current struggles in the limelight. It becomes even more challenging to separate the past from the present, the persona from the private. It’s the strongest, most thoughtful entry in the trilogy, elevating the ideas found in the previous two films. The trilogy’s unique power stems from Larraín’s fascination with breaking the public’s perception of these enigmatic women in a way that separates him from his peers. Selecting a hyper-specific sliver of each woman’s life doesn’t solve her riddle, but it instead creates a new viewpoint that clashes with the iconography that’s defined her. The results are kaleidoscopic, taking liberties with the truth to courageously create a new one reflective of her power. 

Larraín knows that Jolie’s movie star persona allows her to access the clash of the public and the private to an even stronger degree than her predecessors, but he doesn’t simply rely on the audience’s knowledge of her celebrity to craft the narrative. Instead, he smartly creates a metatextual structure in its own right, a film within a film entitled “Maria Callas: The Last Days.” The camera crew is led by Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a manifestation of Maria’s reliance on the Quaalude that causes her to hallucinate. No matter, “What is real and what is not is my business,” she shares. As Maria glides through the streets of Paris in her signature glasses and a gorgeous fur and leather coat, Mandrax follows at attention. Throughout her career, Maria had a difficult relationship with the press and the public, but she seems comfortable with Mandrax, allowing him to ask her probing questions about her music, her thorny relationship with her fans, and her partnership with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). Smit-McPhee understands the off-kilter nature of these scenes and injects a sense of humor and drama found in characters in the opera. The camera embodies that, too, changing the aspect ratio and artistic style to reflect both the grandness of a stage performance and the handheld, freewheeling style of vérité filmmaking. 

While she avoids the doctor waiting for her at home, Lachman, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (Spencer), and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parini (Cyrano) craft a version of Paris that’s Maria’s own opera house. Lachman’s bright, warm autumn hues of the present contrast the crisp glamour of the black and white interludes, recalling Vittorio Storaro’s work in The Conformist. In the black and white sequences, Larraín and Jolie vividly explore Maria’s past in vignettes, first as a child forced to sing for S.S. soldiers, then as a woman falling in love despite her protestations, and, in one of the film’s great scenes, having a conversation with John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson in his third portrayal of JFK after Jackie and Blonde). It’s a scene that connects Maria to Jackie, but even more importantly, it displays just how intertwined the lives of these two women really were, even if they never share the screen. The present-day scenes also beautifully reflect the staging of an opera, with a crowd of people singing to Maria as she overlooks the Eiffel Tower before cutting away to show that she’s alone. The stage is in her mind, but the film ensures that that doesn’t make it less real. 

Jolie is absolutely spellbinding as Maria Callas, imbuing her with grace and resolve. As she sings alongside a lone pianist on stage and tries to find La Divina again, Jolie doesn’t disappear into the role, she transcends. It’s impossible not to think of the stars of Old Hollywood like Greta Garbo or Gloria Swanson when watching Jolie’s Maria as she’s “in the mood for adulation” at her gorgeous vanity, waiting to be adored only to confront a man while sitting outside at a bistro, or repeatedly asking Ferruccio to move the piano to a new position. She’s imperious and vulnerable, but also incredibly funny, highlighting the pain and humor in the character. In the sequences when Maria is performing (past or present), Jolie allows Callas’ music to speak for itself while also displaying its power over her and why losing that gift would be so profound. In the same way that the film is a loving tribute to the films in Maria’s lifetime, so is Jolie’s refreshing interpretation of Maria as a classic diva. It’s the best performance by any actress this year. 

In one of the film’s most striking scenes, Maria recounts her performance as Anna Bolena in 1957 in Athens. Not only does this reference to the “Mad Scene” directly connect her with one of Diana’s materializations in Spencer, but it’s also a prime example of how Maria could express on stage what she could not convey in everyday life. In that moment, she recalls her rage towards the public and her paramour or self-proclaimed “whatever,” Aristotle Onassis. Her beauty on stage is tinged with fire and fury, yet when she allows us to observe their relationship, that temper doesn’t rise to the surface. For Maria, art was her form of self-expression, a way to work out what was going on inside. While Knight’s many metaphors of Maria as a caged songbird might be on the nose, they’re far more effective here because they align with the dramatic, lyrical nature of the opera. Like any great opera, Mandrax’s (and Larraín’s) film reaches its inevitable confrontation with death. Still, there is a comfort in understanding that this is what Maria has been preparing for in her solo sessions on stage and, in many respects, throughout her career. In Maria, Jolie gives Maria Callas a new voice; the women she embodied on the stage and the woman in her mind all irrevocably connected.  

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2024 New York Film Festival. Maria will be released in select theaters on November 27 and on Netflix December 11.