Media Room: Movie Review – ‘Maria’
Angelina Jolie Stars As Legendary Soprano Maria Callas
By: Frank Housh
You don’t have to be an opera lover to enjoy the Maria Callas biopic “Maria,” but it helps. Just as Beatles fans know that they developed their sound in Hamburg, opera fans know something of the tragic backstory that filled Callas with trauma, pain, and the voice of an angel.
To illustrate why she is regarded as the greatest operatic soprano of all time, listen (below) to her performance of “Casta Diva,” from Bellini’s “Norma” (1831), a famous soprano aria. Callas is Norma, a Druid priestess in Gaul facing Julius Caesar’s Roman invaders.
The aria is a prayer for peace to the Chaste Druid Goddess of the Moon (Casta Diva), but her audience of Druid priests does not know that Norma’s heart has betrayed her, creating a forbidden love with a Roman soldier. As devastatingly portrayed in the movie, Callas’ mother regularly prostituted Maria and her sister to Athens’ Nazi occupiers in unthinkable acts of betrayal.
Like all great artists, Callas mastered her instrument early in life; while her performance of “Casta Diva’s” complex, demanding melody feels effortless, no amount of technical skill can create the drama and pathos in her voice.
This story of tragedy creating beauty is, I think, the story that “Maria” seeks to tell.
The action begins at the end, with Callas lying dead from heart failure in her elegant Paris apartment (September 16, 1977, 36 Avenue Georges Mendel). The audience is immediately taken “one week earlier” to find Callas under the influence of the hypnotic sedative “Mandrax” (methaqualone, or “Quaaludes”).
We follow a dying Callas in her final week, her voice failing and happily unable to discern reality from drug-induced hallucination. As she is interviewed by a self-conjured biographer (named “Mandrax”) and serenaded by imagined crowds at the Palais Royal, her life story is told in flashbacks.
Angelina Jolie delivers a poised but haunted Maria, surrounded by excellent supporting performances by Pierfranceso Favino as her butler Ferruccio, Alba Rohrwacher as her chef Bruna, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Mandrax.
Unfortunately, “Maria” drags in the middle as it dwells on her relationship with Aristotle Onassis and the shipping tycoon’s abandonment of her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy (Callas once said, “only my dogs will not betray me”). Although this allowed for the portrayal of her brief encounter with JFK at his May 1962 birthday party (overshadowed by a breathy “Happy Birthday Mr. President” by Marilyn Monroe), it added little to the story.
“Maria’s” use of flashbacks as a storytelling device allows director Pablo Lorraín and cinematographer Edward Lachmann to include diverse settings and styles, all to great effect. The audience feels both the dismal claustrophobia of occupied Athens and the glamour of the La Scala stage.
As one might fairly expect from a movie starring Angelina Jolie in Paris, “Maria” is beautiful. Jolie as Callas promenades through Paris, sumptuously shot in slow panorama, dressed in haute couture, and sitting in cafes “waiting to be adored.”
“Maria’s” use of drug-induced hallucinations rendering its subject an unreliable narrator is clever and, I think, successful. Just like our heroine, we can never really be sure what is going on in front of us is real or hallucination.
“Maria” completes Lorraín’s trilogy which began with “Jackie,” starring Natalie Portman (2016), and “Spencer,” starring Kristen Stewart (2021), each telling the tragic stories behind real women we have transformed into icons.
“Maria” – like its subject, like opera, like life – is sad and beautiful.
“Maria” has a runtime of 124 minutes. It was released in select theaters in the United States on Nov. 27, 2024, and begins streaming on Netflix on December 11.
This review was based on a Nov. 29, 2024, screening at The North Park Theater in Buffalo, where it plays through Dec. 5, 2024. For tickets and more information click here.
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