Pablo Larraín’s Maria – An Unjust, Clichéd Portrayal of Maria Callas

Posted on December 17, 2024 by Maria-Cristina Necula in Playing Around

Pablo Larraín’s film Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, aims to depict the last week of Maria Callas’s life as she struggles with her health and mental state under the influence of meds and haunted by memories, while attempting to return to singing.

Before I launch into my comments about this film, I would like to state that, despite any instinctive reservations I’ve had since the film was first announced, I did my best to keep an open mind. Nonetheless, it was impossible to maintain that openness when, relatively quickly, it became clear that Angelina Jolie’s portrayal was based on posing. What I mean is that, while preparing the role, she had probably watched Callas’s interviews and public appearances to adopt the diva’s body language, gestures, movements, and the cadence and accent of her speaking voice. But her attempt to transfer Callas’s public persona into the private, daily Maria failed to invoke the complex humanity of the woman that was Maria, a woman who could also be endearing and sweet and earthy—characteristics that are, sadly, absent here.

What we do get from Larraín and Angelina Jolie is a flat, drug-addled, pompous, rigid caricature of La Divina, who alternates mainly between two expressions: pained and patronizing, even in the flashbacks to her operatic glory and passionate days with Onassis. Yes, it is known that in the last period of her life Callas lived in seclusion in her Paris apartment, attended by her butler Ferruccio (played by Pierfrancesco Favino) and her maid Bruna (played by Alba Rohrwacher). It is known that she was taking medications to alleviate her anxiety and depression at having lost the two great loves of her life: her voice and Onassis. Nevertheless, it strikes me as highly unlikely that Callas was placing such unreasonable demands on her butler to move the piano to different locations throughout her vast apartment for no apparent reason. If this futile accessory to the plot was meant to be funny, it isn’t.

Steven Knight’s screenplay unfolds like one of those holders of postcards, visually appealing yet glittering with clichés and sensationalist cheap shots. I doubt that President Kennedy ever propositioned Maria Callas and that, after refusing him, she turned into an insinuating harpy and implied that something louche was already happening between Onassis and Jackie Kennedy. Why, why, why was this necessary?

And the larger question is: Why was this film necessary? All it achieves is do an enormous injustice to Maria Callas the artist and the woman. For those of us who know Callas’s art and life story, this injustice is unbearable. And for those who don’t know her, I shudder when I wonder: What kind of impression will they get of this genius who revolutionized the art of operatic singing in the 20th century?

Not to mention that Angelina always plays Angelina, and one cannot get away from her persona to envision Callas, not even for a moment. The film is also a showcase of Jolie’s mannerisms: for instance, the semi-grunting “hmm” she tends to insert into silences, whose intended meanings, throughout most of her films, I haven’t yet been able to figure out. I believe that it was a mistake to cast an inimitable, instantly recognizable personality to portray an inimitable, instantly recognizable artist. Jolie’s distinctive characteristics, that she never veils as other actors do, can’t help but break the spell. To portray Callas, we need a chameleonic actor, or someone perhaps lesser known, someone who knows how to efface her unique characteristics and shed her identity in the interpretation, which Angelina does not achieve in any of her films.

This is not to say that Jolie isn’t a good actor. Her efforts toward playing Callas—including taking singing lessons for seven months—should be lauded and recognized, and, besides, she was not responsible for this screenplay. I have enjoyed and appreciated many of Jolie’s cinematic performances. Yet she should never again be cast as another famous personality; it just does not work. All you will see is Angelina still being Angelina wearing different attires, and in this case, also singing. If you know nothing or little about Callas and have no point of reference, you might be able to agree with those who consider this performance award-winning material. Jolie could effectively bring her own personality and styles of expression to the tragedy of a singer in decline, if this were the tragedy of a fictional singer. And given that opera is not a part of mainstream culture, many who watch this movie will, most likely, take it all at face value and never even question whether it truly does justice to Maria Callas.

Maria does have a few redeeming qualities. The first is that we get to hear Callas’s voice: recordings of “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s Otello, “Qui la voce” from Bellini’s I Puritani, the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s Tosca, among others, offer thrills and some respite from the frustrating drudgery of watching this film. The second is the magnificent cinematography by Ed Lachman: images of Paris, the apartment, and the opera houses and stages enchant the gaze. The third is the black-and-white flashback to Athens to a teenage Maria (movingly played by Aggelina Papadopoulou) entertaining German soldiers by singing beautifully with her sister, while their mother also tries to pimp the two girls out to the soldiers. And the fourth is the impressive turn by Valeria Golino as Maria’s sister, Yakinthi. Here is an example of how an actor can be chameleonic. Golino is completely believable and practically unrecognizable; she embodies the mature Greek woman to perfection in her voice, her accent, her expressions, her face, and her body language. This kind of full immersion to the point of obliteration of the actor’s self is precisely what we would have needed from Maria’s protagonist.

As a Callas fan, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this film. In fact, I am eager to erase it from my mind. However, if you do decide to watch it, please do so with a massive grain of salt and do not associate the portrayal on the screen with the complex artist and woman that was Maria Callas. What you will be watching is an upsettingly reductive, superficial, and clichéd representation of Maria’s personality and life.

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