“Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s drama about the legendary American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, begins on the day of her death, September 16, 1977. As thin as a wraith, clad in a white nightgown, she has collapsed on the living-room floor of her very grand Paris apartment. The film then flashes back to one week before; most of it takes place during that week (though it’s dotted with key episodes from Callas’s life). So we know exactly where this is going. But we don’t just know where it’s going because the movie is set during that fateful final week. We know it because the story “Maria” tells is that of a neurotic death spiral.
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The apartment, with its chandeliers hanging from high ceilings, its wooden walls and large old canvases, as well as the most luxurious bed I think I’ve ever seen in a movie, is splendid enough to suggest the court of an 18th-century French royal. This is Larraín’s third inside portrait of an iconic female figure of the 20th century, after “Jackie” (about Jacqueline Kennedy) and “Spencer” (about Princess Diana). In all three, the residences loom with significance, like elaborate stage sets that act as gilded cages. Jackie Kennedy, of course, occupied the White House. “Spencer” took place at Queen Elizabeth’s country estate. But though the Maria Callas we see lives a life of luxury, her apartment, far more than the houses in the other films, feels like a prison of her own making.
Maybe that’s because her whole life has become a prison. Maria gets through the days by taking her “medicine,” a cocktail of uppers and downers, notably Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative that she obtains illegally. She doesn’t eat much; we learn that she’ll skip food for three or four days at a time, an eating disorder related to her obsession with staying skinny, in contrast to the “fat” girl she was when she grew up. Everything about Maria is obsessive. She treats the two people who’ve taken care of her for years — her housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), and her butler and chauffeur, Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) — like vassals whose purpose in life it to cater to her whims. (Feruccio is a mensch with a bad back, but she keeps ordering him to move the grand piano around, for no good reason.) She avoids meeting her doctor as if he were the devil. And she fantasizes, night after night, that she’s being visited by the ghost of her former lover, Aristotle Onassis.
And then there’s the matter of her voice. Maria is 53, and she hasn’t sung in public for four-and-a-half years. Yet the way the film presents her, she’s a total artist, a woman fueled and consumed by her gift, which is to sing opera with a voice so sublime, so pure in its piercing majesty, that it reaches to the heavens. “Maria” is filled with opera, notably by the 19th-century Italian composers (Verdi, Rossini, Puccini) who Callas elevated in the repertoire. Every time an aria comes on the soundtrack, we’re swept up by the power of her gift. Jolie does an extraordinary job of lip-syncing to the nuances of Callas’s vocal splendor. And we can feel how the singing haunts Maria, who can’t listen to her old records; they have a perfection that gives her pain. “Audiences expect miracles,” she says with rueful awareness. “I can no longer perform miracles.” Her voice, while far from gone, is much weaker now. As the vocal coach and accompanist (Stephen Ashfield) she visits over the course of the week tells her, after listening to her perform an aria, “That was Maria singing. I want to hear La Callas!”
The myth of La Callas — the voice that enraptured the world — is what’s now imprisoning Maria. If she can’t bring La Callas back, then what point is there in living? You might call that a story as tragic as an opera: a great artist trapped by the fading of her gift. Yet you could also say that it makes the Maria Callas of “Maria” not so much a grand heroine striving for something real as a doomed legend living on fumes, like Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.”
The central figures in “Jackie” and “Spencer,” although they were dealing with hellish circumstances, were quite different from that. “Jackie” was set during the week after JFK’s assassination, and it was about how Jackie Kennedy rallied herself, knowing how important what would happen during that week would be to history; in doing so, she became a profile in courage. “Spencer” was about how Diana faced up to the existential crisis of her arranged marriage and decided to save herself by changing the nature of the modern monarchy. Both movies were about a dark kind of triumph.
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“Maria” bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín’s lavish empathy and filmmaking skill. Yet the movie, in contrast, is driven by a dramatic fatalism that does it little favor. It’s the first of these three films that’s about a great artist, yet Maria, somehow, seems a lesser figure than the heroines of “Jackie” or “Spencer.” Or, at least, it feels like there’s less at stake.
Jolie’s performance is, in many ways, quite fine. From the moment she appears on screen, she seizes our attention, playing Maria as woman of wiles who is imperious, mysterious, fusing the life force of a genius diva with the downbeat emotional fire of a femme fatale. Jolie, for the first time in years, reminds you that she can be a deadly serious actor of commanding subtlety and power. Yet I wish that Larraín and his screenwriter, Steven Knight (“Spencer,” “Locke”), had found a greater vulnerability in the end-of-her-tether Maria.
“Maria,” as shot by the great Edward Lachman, has an autumnal visual warmth that’s beautiful and seductive. The flashbacks are in black-and-white, and they color in Maria’s past, though in a way that leaves us with as many questions as answers. That’s also true of her interviews with an eager young filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) named — weirdly — Mandrax. Her bad relationship with her mother is captured in scenes, set during WWII, in which the young Maria is asked to sing for (and sleep with) German soldiers.
But the key flashbacks are those built around Onassis, the fabled Greek shipping tycoon she fell in love with in 1959. Haluk Bilginer plays him as a charismatic troll who calls himself “ugly” but revels so manipulatively in the power of his wealth that he makes himself somehow…irresistible. Maria gets caught up in his mystique, yet won’t give herself over to his control; that’s why the two never marry. (In fact, Onassis left Callas to marry Jackie Kennedy, something the film deals with tangentially, by introducing JFK as a character.)
There’s a feeling of fate hanging over “Maria.” It’s Larraín’s way of raising the stakes, yet in a strange way it ends up lowering them as well. Such is the nature of Maria Callas’s determination to control her destiny that even the hopes of the audience — that she’ll somehow find a way to transcend her funk — aren’t allowed to interfere with her self-fulfilling downward spiral. We get a lot of glimpses (shot on different film stocks) of Callas on stage, back in her 1950s and ’60s heyday. But none of them are extended enough to let us sink into the sensation of her artistry bringing down the house. At one point, Maria observes that singing opera the way she does is so draining it takes the life out of you. In its way, that’s an awesome thought, but by the end of “Maria” you almost feel like it’s taken the life out of the movie.
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