Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas admirably in Larrain’s elegantly shot biopic about the troubled final days of the famous opera singer, though it somewhat suffers from a contrived script.

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Maria may be the weakest of Pablo Larrain’s ‘3 Women’ trilogy (well, three for now), as his fascination with iconic women from the 20^th century continues with Maria Callas, often regarded as one of the greatest opera singers of her time. 

Relatively less well-known in the popular consciousness than, say, Jacqueline Kennedy (Jackie, 2016) or Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021), Callas is played by Angelina Jolie, who underwent vocal training for seven months to ‘perfect’ the role, though perfection isn’t a word one might use to describe the final days in the life of the singer who looks back at her troubled past. 

Larrain’s work is, in fact, about the imperfections that become more difficult to hide as people age, and for someone so used to being in the public spotlight, which includes pesky paparazzi, Callas realises she can never sing well again. 

Hence, Jolie’s performance, one that strives for a balance between authenticity and the natural inability to reach the ‘prime Maria Callas’ level is the masterstroke that might elude audiences that are there just for the acting and story. 

She wasn’t rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Best Leading Actress in a rather crowded year, and I suspect that it is because Maria isn’t an immediately striking work that some of Larrain’s earlier, more unconventional projects could claim to be. 

“I took liberties all my life. And the world took liberties with me.”

The absence of highly unorthodox composers like Mica Levi and Jonny Greenwood whom he collaborated with respectively in the two abovementioned films, also makes it less musically interesting. 

After so many years of listening to almost every kind of music, I still find myself unable to appreciate opera, so a film like Maria doesn’t quite resonate with me at that level. 

From a human angle, Larrain’s film tries its best to engage through Jolie’s admirable display, but the script is often bogged down by contrivances (e.g. surreal sequences of people in the street suddenly singing in unison, or intercuts of an empty opera house with a full one as Callas attempts to sing-relive the old days) that seem to want to depict Callas’ self-destructive psychological state as needing a reason to exist visually.

At the same time, Larrain’s use of meta-filmic cues (e.g. inserts of the clapperboard) and the frequent switching from colour to black-and-white flashbacks somewhat distances us from really empathising with the titular figure.

Grade: B-

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