Since 2016, director Pablo Larraín has made three films about culturally significant women of the 20th century. “Jackie” (Jackie Kennedy) leans into camp and melodrama; “Spencer” (Princess Diana) took elements from gothic horror: and “Maria” (Maria Callas) is an opera.
If you’ve ever heard Maria Callas sing, you’ve probably never forgotten the sound. Her voice was singular – thick, dynamic, full of a range of emotion. She is one of the most important opera voices in history, and her life, particularly her final years, were laden with pain, both physical and emotional. The movie chronicles the final days before her death in Paris, her health and addiction issues, and her relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis – who, funnily enough, married Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s death.
But while the details of Maria’s life are interesting in their own right, the film (written by Steven Knight) is at its best not when it focuses on the external, but rather the internal – particularly when it takes that inner life and manifests it visually onscreen. Through Maria’s relationship not just to the public, but to herself, Larraín explores ideas about celebrity and persona that have fascinated Hollywood for years, but have so rarely been afforded the nuance they deserve. Casting Angelina Jolie, a woman with her own unique relationship to celebrity, only deepens that complexity.
For “Maria,” Larraín teamed back up with cinematographer Edward Lachman, who shot Larraín’s 2023 film “El Conde,” one of the best looking movies of that year. The camera feels stately in its movements – slow, but not leisurely, and intensely focused, much like Maria herself. The camera’s imperiousness comes into tension with the lushness of Guy Hendrix Dyas’ production design. There’s majesty in the artwork that covers Maria’s Parisian apartment, in the collection of marble busts that decorates her closet, to be sure. But everything feels hollow in way – a gorgeous shot of Maria in a white robe, draped like a Botticelli model over her record player as she listens to her own voice is visually expressive in a way that surpasses the beauty on the surface. There’s a blankness in her eyes, something futile in all that loveliness, something missing she can’t quite find.
“Maria” doesn’t tell its story linearly, moving back and forth between Maria’s final days and flashbacks shot in gorgeous black and white. The black and white moments mostly center around Maria’s relationship with Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), but aren’t nearly as compelling as the moments that focus on Maria alone. Throughout this trilogy, Larraín has taken a more unconventional approach to biopics, focusing primarily on a few important days in the life of his subject with a few jumps in time here and there. But the most important aspects of the film usually take place within the main timeframe. With “Maria,” it feels like Larraín and Knight try to place more importance on the black and white sections and Maria and Onassis’ relationship. However, the film often gets away from its visual prowess in these sections, leaning more on exposition. It feels a little flat, whereas the rest of the film is operatic.
But, when the film lends all of its focus to Maria, Larraín regains that visual mastery. Maria is contemplating the idea of performing once again, but her declining health and her dependence on drugs is holding her back. At the beginning of the film, she takes a hypnotic sedative called mandrax, prompting a hallucination involving a documentary film crew coming to interview her. She and the interviewer – named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – wander through the streets of Paris, usually when Maria is on her way to meet her vocal coach, discussing different aspects of her life and career. Throughout these interludes, Maria sees music everywhere. In one of the film’s best sequences, an orchestra plays in the rain, intricately-costumed dancers surrounding Maria, almost consuming her. Mandrax pops in for a little meta commentary – this is the part of the film where you’re expected to sing, he says. But she’s not ready to step into La Callas’ shoes again. She’s not sure if she ever will be.
Here, we see the movie begin to lean into (and ultimately try and subvert) the classic Marilyn v. Norma Jean dichotomy – except this time, it’s La Callas v. Maria. She wakes up every morning and people wonder who they’ll get today: the woman or the diva?
Marilyn Monroe appears for a brief moment in this movie, so it’s hard to imagine Larraín and Knight weren’t thinking of that comparison, or of Jolie’s own experience with her public and private life. But rather than treating that conversation as having to do with separation, as two separate women living within one body, it becomes about connection. Who Maria chooses to be is about how she relates to herself on any given day. And if she tells someone she’s Maria that day, her behavior isn’t all that different from the days she says she is La Callas. Both are a part of her and both serve her in different ways, and only she can really know where they diverge and intersect.
Towards the end of the film, a journalist who spied on one of Maria’s rehearsals approaches her on the street about how much her voice has deteriorated over the years, a confrontational and distressing moment made all the more so by virtue of it being Angelina Jolie on our screens, someone whose personal life and persona have been litigated to hell for decades. “Maria,” far more than “Jackie” or “Spencer,” leaves the audience questioning what right we have to this woman’s life? What right do we have to decide who she was? Of course, the movie comes into conflict with itself in even asking that question as it tries to paint its own portrait of her. But that only adds to the question’s complexity.