MARIA (2024)

If you’ve seen Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), the previous entries in the Chilean filmmaker’s “Important Women of the 20th-century trilogy”, then you’ll have a good idea of what to expect in terms of style and tone with Maria, his final entry in this thematic series.

Those earlier films, about Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, respectively, cast their spotlights on a specific timeframe: with Jackie, it was a week after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, while Spencer focused on the Royal family’s 1991 Christmas celebrations. Both films were beautifully shot and used historical events as their narrative springboards—however, despite featuring glamorous actors and settings, they were ultimately dark psychological dramas.

Here, Larraín focuses on Greek-American soprano Maria Callas, who’s gone down in history as one of the greatest opera singers to have lived and who regularly performed across Europe and the US from 1947 until 1965.

Much like Larraín’s previous biographical dramas, the main story takes a snapshot of a brief period in time and features an A-list American actress in the lead role, with none other than Angelina Jolie stepping into Callas’s shoes. As with most of Jolie’s work, her performance is strong and certainly deserving of recent Academy Award buzz, but despite a few standout scenes, Maria ends up being the weakest of Larraín’s thematic trilogy.

In September 1977, just weeks before she died, soprano Maria Callas was living in Paris, enjoying a seemingly glamorous life with a luxuriously large apartment and a butler and maid waiting on her every whim—with various TV crews and paparazzi vying for her attention. Of course, the reality is very different, as by this point in her career Maria hadn’t sung for three years because she’d (perhaps unfairly) earned herself full diva status and, as many rumours had been reporting, her voice was fading after years of overuse and dramatic weight loss from when she was younger. Not only that, her eyesight was declining and her mental state was far from perfect, not least because she’d become addicted to a cocktail of uppers and downers following her physically abusive marriage with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer).

Maria begins with the eponymous singer looking towards trying to regain her singing career after years away from the public eye. She wants to rectify public rumour (and her own doubts) that her famous soprano voice is failing and so sets out to have a TV crew interview her, while she embarks on some singing sessions with an old composer friend to see exactly what her voice is like.

From the off, Larraín takes us into Maria Callas’s world of wealth and glamour, witnessing her large Parisian apartment in all its art deco splendour. We also quickly discover that Maria’s concerned about the impending TV interview, and has her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) trying to move the rather large piano to somewhere more appropriate, during which time her maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) is busy cooking breakfast while Maria sings to her briefly.

This opening scene skilfully sets up the household dynamics, and we also get a brief insight into Maria’s mental health and drug addiction; the TV crew that turn up—particularly young filmmaker Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee)—are used as a device to portray vivid hallucinations, resulting from the singer’s chemical excesses.

Alongside the lush interiors, the film shows off Paris and other unnamed European vistas to stunning effect. American cinematographer Edward Lachman, whose previous work includes Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015), cleverly employs several different types of film stock to imitate the 1970s period, along with great use of monochrome and sunlight.

As one would expect with this type of real-life tragic character to base a performance, Jolie goes all out with her acting, giving a powerful yet sensitive portrayal of the famously troubled celebrity; not once resorting to something resembling a one-dimensional impression. Such was her commitment to the part she trained her voice for seven months, so jer own singing features in six songs, mixed to varying amounts with old Maria Callas recordings.

And yet, despite the glitz and strong acting, Maria plays out unevenly and much less assuredly compared to the director’s past female-oriented movies. Whereas those films were full of foreboding and dramatic tension, here that’s sorely lacking.

The screenplay, while presenting audiences with surface-level details about the singer’s life, doesn’t do nearly enough to let you know what’s going on behind Maria’s large mascara eyes; the result is you’re not emotionally invested with this character, so all her dramatic posturing and eccentric comments like: “My life is opera, there is no reason in opera” carry no real weight and you are left thinking so what!

There are interesting glimpses of Maria’s childhood, where her mother forced her to sing to Nazi soldiers in exchange for food—the alternative being prostitution—but the film jumps far too frequently to a mishmash of past opera performances and scenes with her ex-husbands; most notably with Onassis who, of course, left Maria in pursuit of JFK’s widow Jackie Kennedy. There are also a few moments showing Maria with her sister Yakinthi (Valeria Golino) that, to be fair, attempt to add some backstory but it is still too brief.

Some of the film’s stronger sequences are when Maria is interacting with her butler Ferruccio and maid Bruna. There’s a real sense of lived-in history with all concerned. At times, Maria can be dismissive to them, but she is never cruel, at one point you even see them all playing cards together. Despite the professionally forced hierarchical relationship, the servants have affection for her and are concerned for her wellbeing, which at least goes some way to creating some emotional heft when Maria finally succumbs to her ailing health and dies of a heart attack at the tragically young age of 53.

After seeing Maria, I came away feeling somewhat frustrated that, with all the talent involved, Pablo Larraín fell short in recounting Maria Callas’s fascinating yet sad life story. It’s still worth a watch, and if you can, see it at the cinema to fully appreciate the stunning cinematography and beautiful music, but Maria, unfortunately, remains a missed opportunity for something more nuanced and in-depth, which this great artist surely deserved.

ITALY • GERMANY • CHILE • USA | 2024 | 124 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR • BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH • GREEK

Cast & Crew

director: Pablo Larraín.
writer: Steven Knight.
starring: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Haluk Bilginer, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino & Caspar Phillipson.