Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín fail to capture the power and complexity of their subject in Maria

Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas suffers from an insurmountable flaw. Despite channeling the legendary soprano’s mercurial intensity, Jolie fails to bring to life Callas’s singing. Pablo Larraín’s nonlinear biopic Maria, created as a pastiche of different media and perspectives, will suddenly cut away to Jolie alone against a backdrop, with Callas’s real voice playing on the soundtrack. Jolie’s eyes light up, her mouth moves, but not even for a passing moment do we feel that the voice is pouring out of her body. 

Set just a week before her untimely death, Callas lives in Paris and hasn’t performed publicly in years. Her voice is fading and she’s turned to drugs to manage her psychological and chronic pain. Her once strong body, tuned almost like an athlete, is failing her. A doctor warns her early on that her attempts at a musical comeback will likely kill her. The violence of opera singing wreaks havoc on the body; Callas won’t give up her efforts, though. Jolie, though capable in nearly every other demand of the role, being unable to translate this aspect of Callas becomes a major reason for the film’s failure. 

Part of an unofficial trilogy that also includes Jackie and Spencer, Larraín is uninterested in conventional biopic tropes. Though it makes extensive use of flashbacks, the film zeroes in on a very small slice of life, one marked by turmoil and confusion. Consumed by drug addiction, Callas begins losing a grasp on reality. She hallucinates. The film springs from her consciousness, fractured and unpredictable, as time and identity collapses upon itself. 

Maria, though compelling in theory, suffers from a narrative vagueness that doesn’t plague the other films in the trilogy, which are grounded in one monumental event. Callas is psychologically but also narratively uprooted, her collapse untethered from any specific moment. Though likely true to life, it leads the film to feel unfocused and highlights Larraín’s struggle to make sense of Callas’s monumental life. 

Unlike the other two iconic women, Jackie and Princess Diana, Maria Callas was not born into the bourgeoisie. Through flashbacks, we see how her voice and body were used to survive living in Greece during WW2. Larraín seems to struggle to reconcile elements of Callas’s autobiography that pushed her into survival mode with where she finds herself in the end. Though the other two films similarly deal with issues of weight and restriction, this film doesn’t seem to know how to address Callas’s monumental weight loss earlier in life and loathing for her young, plump body. We are not allowed the privilege of understanding any of Callas’s complex inner world, even if the moviemaking abandons a more conventional, realistic approach. 

Another difference from the Diana and Jackie films is that we’re now faced with a woman who has a cinematic body of work. How can you watch Pasolini’s Medea starring Maria Callas and genuinely feel that Jolie does any justice to the desperate and otherworldly strength of that screen presence? Though she makes a novel effort, Jolie’s beauty feels too calculated to be dangerous, lacking the mythic weight of the person she portrays. 

What, in the end, does the film have to say about Callas? Nothing more than any documentary could offer, and it does little to capture the enormity of her presence. It’s a film that’s superficially beautiful, but fails to capture the ugliness or complexity of its central character. ■

Maria is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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