Maria

Pablo Larraín continues his series of biopics that take place over a week with this story of the legendary American-Greek soprano Maria Callas, arguably the world's greatest opera singer. Much like the director's Jackie and Spencer, Maria is about a well-known yet unknowable, beautiful, privileged, and haunted 20th-century woman at a difficult time in her life, and the film depends on an outstanding lead actress. In this case, the difficult life crossroad depicted is the final week of the character's existence, and the outstanding actress gives what may very well be the best performance by any actor this year.

Angelina Jolie embodies the frail and heavily medicated fifty-three-year-old Callas, cloistered away in her grand Parisian apartment in 1977, as she reflects on her life and career. Attended to by her butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher), who are both deeply loyal and concerned about her wellbeing, Maria wafts about the grand abode, which feels like a museum to her former self—the elegant Opera-world equivalent of Graceland or Paisley Park. She informs her staff that she will be interviewed by a young director (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who is making a film about her life, but it seems pretty clear to both the butler and to herself that this young man is a hallucination, especially since he shares his name with one of the prescriptions she takes. Maria also ventures out into the world of Paris, sitting at outdoor cafes to be admired and secretly meeting with conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield), who worked with her at the end of her career years ago. He is curious to see if the unparalleled singing voice of "La Callas" still dwells within her despite her heavy consumption of booze, drugs, and cigarettes.

That singing voice sets this movie apart from typical biopics and even from the prior two entities in Larraín's biographical trilogy. I'm not an opera buff and have only been to the Met once in my life, but many of my close friends are singers, and my grandmother was a professional operatic soprano when she was young. (I remember seeing her collection of vinyl when I was a kid, and it seemed like a third of the shelves were marked "Callas." My grandmother's end of life was not unlike the one depicted here, though far less grand and without the adoring fans). I cannot judge the differences between a great opera singer and a mediocre one, but there's no question about how stirring the music is in this movie and how well it's used to provide context, evoke feelings, and shift from flashbacks to the present-day of the story. Apparently, Jolie trained to sing opera seriously for seven months in preparation for this role so that her singing would look authentic, and her actual singing voice was digitally mixed to varying degrees with recordings of Maria Callas. I have no idea how much of this digital blending is marketing PR and how much is truly masterful audio work, but I wasn't aware of any behind-the-scenes stories concerning this film before seeing it, and I was absolutely enthralled watching Jolie's Callas sing.

The film flashes back to times when Maria was most alive, on stage singing arias to massive, adoring audiences, and we can assume that the changes we hear in her singing voice during the many abrupt, though never jarring, transitions from her memories of past performances in various packed venues to the rehearsals in an empty theater were accomplished by using far more of Jolie's own voice for the Callas of 1977. These flashbacks open up the history of Maria's life, yet they never feel like info dumps. We only witness events that feel like they'd be relevant to her as she's looked wistfully and often regretfully back. Still, the screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, Locke, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Spencer) sometimes feels a little by the numbers. I guess that's inevitable with this type of movie. Fortunately, the scenes that play the most like a standard biopic, such as her romance with Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and her one interaction with JFK (Caspar Phillipson), ground this mysterious character in a relatable time and place for those of us ignorant of her life. Bilginer is especially enjoyable as the hyper-confident Onassis, who knows his charm, wealth, and power easily compensate for his lack of movie-star attractiveness.

Veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman uses various 35mm and 16mm film stocks to create various looks that differentiate the contemporary scenes of the late '70s, the black and white flashbacks of the 1960s and Maria's wartime late-teenage years in Greece during the '40s, and the surrealistic color stages of her iconic performances in her years when she was the toast of the Opera world. Production Designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Inception, Spencer) and a huge team of VFX artists (this little movie has an insanely long end credits scroll) do an incredible job of creating an immersive world of the past. I think the production shot in every country the story depicts, and the scenes on Onassis's yacht were filmed on the actual Christina O. Costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini dresses Jolie in dazzling outfits that feel worthy of her uniquely outsized movie star presence.

I'm so glad the filmmakers chose not to try to make Jolie look anything like Maria Callis. This is not the kind of biopic that tries to evoke some uncanny verisimilitude in terms of looking like the actual person. Rather, it uses an actual person to evoke feelings about a bygone era and an emotional state. Also, like Jackie and Spencer, it uses a great modern, much-speculated-upon celebrity who is also a movie star (not all famous actors these days qualify for that term) to portray a female personality from half a century or more ago whose celebrity was as much a prison as a privilege. Of all the actresses working today, no one inherently embodies and recalls that type of double-edged sword like Jolie, whose impossible glamour, otherworldly existence, and what at least seems like remarkable intelligence beguiles and baffles mere mortals like me.