Angelina Jolie’s natural beauty is so ethereal that she floats through her new movie “Maria” as if she were an alien visitor from outer space who finds herself amused by the flotsam and jetsam of Earth.
Jolie plays legendary opera singer Maria Callas in the film and her beguiling performance is worth a visit to the deluxe, albeit, sometimes lethargic motion picture.
Many women and some men have been called divas for a variety of reasons, although too many people don’t truly deserve the description. They are mostly play-acting as if being a diva is a role required to succeed as a performer in the theater of life.
To her fans, Callas is the one true diva, the only diva that matters. She earned the title early in her stellar career and carried it with her until she died at age 53 on September 16, 1977, in her luxurious Paris apartment at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel, where she had lived for 10 years. As noted in the movie, Callas was capable of saying to a waiter without a trace of irony: “I’m not hungry. I come to restaurants to be adored.”
That she was a great opera singer is undeniable. She delivered power in all three vocal registers: low, middle, and upper. She also had a superior on-stage acting presence.
An interesting story about Callas is as true as can be. Music critic John Ardoin was one of her best friends, and he wrote four books about her. Callas would teach occasional singing lessons in New York City, but she never wanted to stay and chat with the students at the end of class. Why? It wasn’t to be rude; it was, as Ardoin has stated because Callas adored the CBS television situation comedy “I Love Lucy,” which came on in reruns at 6:00 in the afternoon in Manhattan. The class had to end at 5:00 so that she could get to her room at the Plaza Hotel to watch the program. Ardoin confirmed this. “Maria could not miss that show,” he said. “She sat on the bed and lived every moment of ‘I Love Lucy.’ I think she was Lucy, watching television with the same intensity she brought to singing “Medea.”
Here’s the problem. Nothing this delightful is to be found in “Maria.” The film meanders in flashbacks for a single week before Callas’s death. It opens with her body covered with a crisp white sheet on the floor of her living room. If there is drama, it’s composed of overwhelming memories of better days. She wondered if she could sing again, especially as well as she did when she was the beloved soprano of all sopranos. She works with an adoring pianist to test her voice.
It is patently obvious that Callas remained heartbroken after she was tossed aside by her wealthy and once-worshipful companion Aristotle Onassis, who then found someone in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who would make him a literal giant in the circles where who you know is as important as how much you are worth and where you live.
The movie succeeds as well as it does because Jolie is as talented as she is. “Maria” is less revealing than it should be. It also lacks a sensibility about entertainment, of what audiences might find enjoyable, informative, or intriguing. This problem falls at the feet of director Pablo Larrain, who relishes making psychological studies of famous women who share a deep-seated misery about their lives and a melancholic yearning for the past.
His two previous pseudo-biographies were about Jacqueline Onassis and Princess Diana. The first was mostly good, the second less good. In “Jackie,” Natalie Portman’s acting enlivened the story, which had important layers of content. In “Spenser,” Kristen Stewart was also up to the task, but the mythological aura about Diana served to throw the film off-balance.
As with the other features, “Maria” also suffers from Larrain’s insistence on analyzing his famous female characters, instead of letting their lives breathe. Jolie understands how beauty adds to a woman’s allure, and she is certainly aware of the price of being iconic and celebrated. Larrain has delivered a slow-moving shuffle through a deck of cards that he’s marked. I was with the film, but never fascinated by it or utterly involved. Callas was a passionate woman, but the passion is missing from Steven Knight’s bland screenplay.
The movie has breathtaking singing, most of it from Callas herself. On every level, the picture looks superb. As already stated, Jolie is wonderful. There are very good performances from Alba Rohrwacher as Bruna and Pierfrancesco Favino as Ferruccio, the two main figures in her life: best friends, secret-sharers, and seemingly, her only companions. Bruna is her loyal maid and cook, and Ferruccio is her devoted and paternalistic butler. High praise to Edward Lachman’s gorgeous cinematography, Guy Hendrix Dyas for his gilded sets, and Massimo Cantini Parrini for his beautiful costumes.
During one heightened sequence, which is only occurring in her mind, Callas is interviewed by a young documentary filmmaker. He calls himself Mandrax, which is the name of a prescription drug she is taking. This segment has a hallucinogenic component to it. Maria is lost in a fog of her own making. The actor playing the interviewer is Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays the eerie and troubled young man in 2021’s “The Power Of The Dog.”
The 28-year-old Smit-McPhee suffers from a rare disease – ankylosing spondylitis, which is a degenerative form of arthritis in which the vertebrae in the spine can fuse causing intense pain and vision loss. The actor is blind in his left eye. I’m writing about this because nothing in “Maria” is as discomforting, alarming or fascinating as this fact about the actor’s reality.
The story needed to be more energetic and meticulous. There are essential mysteries about Callas’s life that have been left unexplored. The Onassis segments are filmed as if they are dreams in black and white. What purpose did this relationship serve? In the script, she calls him ugly. She was also married from 1949 to 1959 to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who might as well be vapor. If you want to know about the discovery and training of her talent as a legendary singer, well, you can also forget about that.
“Maria” is the story of a week in the “life” of a corpse. It may well earn Jolie a Best Actress Oscar nomination. It’s a disappointment, but you can decide for yourself through Netflix.