Pablo Larrain’s trilogy of famous and fraught 20th-century women – there is apparently no other kind – concludes with Maria. Larrain’s 2024 biopic of opera singer Maria Callas, like its predecessors Jackie (about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and Spencer (about Diana, Princess of Wales), covers a crucial period in its subject’s life.
The movie is set in the week preceding Maria’s death in 1977. She lives in a splendid apartment in Paris. Her famous voice has all but deserted her. She has a worrying addiction to the sedative Mandrax.
Yet, Maria (Angelina Jolie) is every inch the diva, regally swatting away the concerns of her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). What did you take this morning, the fiercely loyal Ferruccio wants to know. Liberties, Maria says.
Steven Knight’s screenplay is suitably theatrical, in keeping with its performative heroine. She has an unending supply of caustic comebacks. I am perfectly happy with the theatre behind my eyes, Maria tells Bruna.
Maria’s slippery touch with reality is evident in her conversations with a television journalist also named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Maria struggles to regain her singing abilities during rehearsals with the conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield).
Maria is being streamed on Lionsgate Play. Like Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), Maria projects onto its lead character a vision of womanhood guided by emotion rather than intellect, subjectivity rather than distance. The 124-minute film includes Maria’s memories of her relationships with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and her sister Yakinthi (Valeria Golino).
Larrain wants us to believe that Maria is the autobiography that the singer never wrote, but the perspective in the film is entirely his. There’s a touch of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) to Larrain’s treatment of Maria as a prisoner of a self-created imperium, flirting with madness while claiming to be in control of her legacy.
At least unlike the heroines of Jackie and Spencer, Maria comes off as dignified despite her outbursts, in charge of her surroundings even when not evidently so. Angelina Jolie is the single-biggest contributor to the film’s impact.
Jolie deftly conveys Maria Callas’s hauteur and self-regard despite little resemblance to her. Jolie works with her voice as much as her mien, giving Maria a distinctive manner of speech and body language.
The film appears to exist solely to give Jolie a rare opportunity to explore her acting range. At least in this department, Maria hits the right notes.
