Maria Review: LFF 2024
Angelina Jolie is entrancing as fading opera star Maria Callas
Maria charts the last days in the life of legendary opera singer Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie. One of the biggest stars of the 1950s, Maria sang every great part on every great stage across the world, achieving legendary status even today. A diva of the kind to make Mariah Carey look like the girl next door, she was famously temperamental, demanding and hard to please. Though she had a decade long affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis he would eventually leave her to marry Jackie Kennedy, the subject of one of director Larrain’s earlier biopics.
We join Maria in 1977 where she is living alone in Paris with only her two servants for company. She’s not performed in years due to real or imagined health problems and is addicted to prescription medication. Obsessed with finding her voice again she is in secret rehearsals to get back on stage, and while singing recalls many of the most influential performances of her life. Plagued by hallucinations caused by her drug use, it becomes increasingly difficult for Maria to separate reality from dream.
Maria is the latest and final entry in Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s unofficial ‘women in heels’ trilogy of biopics, following 2016’s ‘Jackie’ starring Natalie Portman and 2021’s Princess Diana film ‘Spencer’ starring Kristen Stewart. It’s the first time historical figures have had the potential to cross over in his biopics as there are some characters in common in this time period. Though Jackie Kennedy is only mentioned in this film and not shown on screen, JFK does make a brief appearance, with Caspar Phillipson reprising his role.
It’s a gorgeously crafted, elegant looking film that sets a woman in decline against the autumnal streets of Paris, warmly lit in golden hues. Larrain gives Jolie massive stages and palatial rooms to play in, centring his regal superstar like she is a work of art in a gallery.
Maria doesn’t necessarily work as a traditional biopic – but any fan of Larrain will have come to expect the idiosyncratic portraits he paints of his characters. Maria’s life outside of the opera is sketched in the broadest of strokes; her childhood in Greece and her romantic history are but brief mentions. What we get instead is a near mythical figure, a woman so wrapped up in her art that it seems nothing else exists. This boiling down of her to a single characteristic may be reductive to the actual historical figure herself, but in his single-minded focus Larrain transforms her into one of the tragic heroines from her own operas.
Angelina Jolie is sensational, painting a poised portrait of a Callas who just barely betrays the vulnerability behind her carefully constructed mask. At times uttering witheringly camp come backs and at others managing to dial back her performance to something earth shatteringly human, she never feels like a caricature. Jolie is distractingly beautiful though – Maria was certainly a beautiful woman in her own right, but for her to be portrayed as this luminous creature when she is meant to be frail and close to death only heightens the feeling that we are seeing a stage version of her story and not the truth. She is a beautiful invention.
Beguiling and beautiful, Pablo Larrain’s Maria makes for an entrancing watch. Powered by a stirring central performance from Angelina Jolie, it may not get us any closer to the real Maria Callas, but it certainly enhances her mythology.
Maria is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2024. Maria will be released in UK cinemas on 10th January 2025.
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