‘Maria’ review: Angelina Jolie triumphs in the biopic of an opera legend

It’s a telling moment in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” when opera legend Maria Callas, played with forceful elegance by Angelina Jolie, rails about how much less she earns as a singer than Frank Sinatra.
It’s not jealousy; Callas fought sexism throughout her career. There’s unspoken tension in the Sinatra comparison. While Ol’ Blue Eyes was hailed for his independence — his signature tune, after all, was “My Way” — the equally forthright La Divina (the divine one) was often criticized for being difficult and demanding.
“I took liberties all my life,” she says at one point. “And the world took liberties with me.”
Bathed in autumnal hues lensed by cinematographer Ed Lachman, “Maria” is set in Paris in September 1977, during the final week of Callas’s life. It finds her in a reflective but defiant mood.
She’s famous for the power and grace of her performances in tragic operas, notably the title role in Puccini’s “Tosca.” But the film, with its stirring soundtrack and sumptuous production values (costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini created some 60 dresses for it), isn’t meant to be viewed as a tragedy, at least not in conventional terms.
This makes it unlike the first two chapters of Larraín’s now completed trilogy of great women, “Jackie” (2016) and “Spencer” (2021), in which the Chilean auteur presented Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana as victims and prisoners of cruel circumstances — spousal assassination in one case, royal intolerance in the other — beyond their control.
The Callas of “Maria” has far more agency regarding her personal affairs. In a flashback scene (one of many in the film, mostly in B&W), she blows off a brazen proposition by U.S. President John F. Kennedy with a raised eyebrow and the chilly query, “Where’s Jackie?”
(JFK’s wife, soon to be his widow, is hanging with the equally piggish Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, played by Haluk Bilginer, who was Callas’s romantic partner for nearly a decade before he dumped her to marry the grieving Jackie.)
Jolie certainly fits her leading role, even if her resemblance to Callas is less visual than it is emotional and aural. Months of vocal lessons for the Oscar winner paid off; she impressively handles the singing, which is supplemented in some scenes by Callas’s own voice.
It’s difficult to think of an actor as strong as Jolie playing a victim. Callas is by no means happy, though, as she swans about her expansive Paris apartment, which is cluttered with busts of Ancient Roman characters and monumental paintings. She lives with her two staffers, butler/bodyguard Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and chef/housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), who attend to all her whims, including shifting a piano to random spots as her mood dictates.
Callas’s mood has grown darker. At 53, she dresses mainly in black, although she accessorizes with a colourful head scarf adorned with songbirds. Behind thick octagonal glasses her eyes are more probing.
The diva’s voice, heralded worldwide for its range and passion, has weakened. She hasn’t sung publicly in years, yet she’s toying with the possibility of a comeback, as much as the idea annoys her. She’s also still grieving the death two years earlier of Onassis, who broke her heart even as he retained a piece of it. A touching scene shows Callas visiting him on his deathbed.
Conflicted by her circumstances, Callas demands an outside table at a café (“I come to restaurants to be adored,” she tells the waiter) yet lashes out at a fan who approaches her to express his love.
Most worrisome, especially to her loyal employees, is Callas’s increasing dependence on prescription pills, especially the sedative Mandrax. Ferruccio and Bruna secretly rummage through her clothes, gathering up pills Callas has squirrelled away; her doctor warns that her drug abuse will kill her, as indeed it likely did. (She died from a heart attack.)
Callas is undeterred by the threat of mortal peril: “Music is born of misery, of suffering,” she asserts.
The fact that Mandrax can induce hallucinations is put to use in the film to create scenes of magic realism. One vision arrives, in the film’s least successful construct, in the appearance of a character wincingly named Mandrax, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Popping up throughout “Maria,” he’s a star-struck TV interviewer in a rumpled suit and plaid tie who peppers Callas with awkward questions even as he falls in love with her, as so many other men did.
Much more satisfying is the illusion in which Callas awakes from a restless slumber and walks barefoot and in her nightgown to her living room where a stringed orchestra serenades her with the aria “Vissi d’arte” from “Tosca,” which she sings along to.
It doesn’t make literal sense, but “Maria” isn’t meant to. It’s a story of art over intellect, of raging against the dying of the light, even if the reason for the rage isn’t entirely clear.
“My life is opera,” Callas says. “There is no reason in opera.”