The Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain has now completed a trilogy of unconventional biopics of famous women, first of Jackie Kennedy (2016’s Jackie), then Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer), and now the opera legend Maria Callas (the new Maria). All three films have similar strengths and weaknesses. They’re gorgeously photographed and focus on the main character in a way that centers the lead performance and, ideally, leads to awards attention. Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart were each nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Jackie and Spencer, respectively.
On the other hand, all three are set at a specific time in the life of the protagonist, with an understanding of who she was and what made her tick taking a backseat. The films have also embraced unconventional storytelling gimmicks that haven’t worked.
Spencer wasn’t nearly as compelling a rendering of Diana’s life as the seasons of The Crown that featured Elizabeth Debicki as the Princess of Wales, while I think of Jackie mostly from Ronan Farrow’s memoir when he took repeated shots at his boss at NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, who in his side gig as a screenwriter happened to write Jackie.
I’ve preferred Larrain's recent films outside of the trilogy, especially last year’s El Conde, a bonkers satire depicting Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of the filmmaker’s homeland, as a centuries-old vampire.
Maria stars Angelina Jolie, who between directing, philanthropy, and voice work, hadn't starred in a movie in several years. She plays Callas in her final days, living in Paris, popping pills, plotting a doomed singing comeback, and making her long-suffering household staff—her housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher), and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) — move a heavy piano repeatedly. Most of the action is taken up by Callas interviewed by a documentarian (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who in reality is her drug-induced hallucination, and by flashbacks from throughout her life and singing career, most notably her long affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer.) This forms a sort of crossover with Jackie, as Onassis ended up leaving Callas for the ex-First Lady. We don’t see her, although Maria does get a meeting with JFK.
I didn’t learn much about Callas’ life from this film, and the narrative suffers from one framing device too many. And while Smit-McPhee’s oddball screen presence is a good fit, the hallucination gimmick doesn’t work. Jolie, though, is outstanding. I gather her own vocals were combined with real audio of the actual Callas singing, and it sounds seamless.
The film Maria reminded me most of wasn’t either of the director’s other films but Judy, the 2019 film about Judy Garland. That film was also focused on a famous 20th-century diva’s last days, spent in Europe, and featured an actress (Renee Zellweger) who’d been gone for a while, returning in a movie that sort of functioned as an Oscar-delivery system (successfully, in that case). And in Judy, the lead performance was much better than the movie, which is true for Maria as well.