Maria

★★★ | Divaesque

Maria

Maria is the story of how Maria Callas, famed opera singer and diva, died. It's a film that is less interested in the facts than the mood and tone. We learn very little of Callas, and what little the film reveals is contradictory. At times, it comes uncomfortably close to beautifully staged and performed misery porn.

Angelina Jolie is luminous as Callas. Her performance is a multitude of complexities, each piling on top of another. Callas is difficult to like, yet impossible not to love. We only get the barest sense of who she was, yet combined with Jolie's transcendent screen presence it's enough. "I believe I have fallen in love with you", one character remarks mere moments after meeting Callas. She smiles, knowingly but not unkindly: "That happens often."

Callas knows that people love the idea of her, and it torments her. Her two devoted assistants and housekeepers (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher) quietly care for her with the heartbroken understanding that Maria cannot survive like this. Their days pass in solemn desperation, each knowing the inevitable is ahead. Favino and Rohrwacher are superb in their parts. They're the kind of friends anyone would be lucky to have.

When Maria focuses on the passing of the days and pained recollections of former glories, it's an often heartbreaking experience. But it also introduces a fictional character, a hallucination caused by Maria's addiction to sedatives, called Mandrax, who Maria believes to be making a documentary on her life. It's an unnecessary and messy inclusion that only detracts from the immediacy the rest of the film achieves.

These parts, where Maria and Mandrax break the fourth wall and talk about what the film expects of her at this point, are particularly dire. They're the filmmaker winking at an audience so hard it robs us of whatever connection we've made to Maria so far.

It's thanks to Jolie the rest of the film works so well that these moments, numerous as they are, don't break the experience. Every time I found myself rolling my eyes at the twee back and forth between Mandrax and Maria, Jolie would find a way to mesmerize me all over again. For example, watch what she does in the scene where Maria goes to a cafe expecting adoration from an audience who has already begun to forget her. Jolie captures the anxiety and contradiction of yearning for attention, yet still dreading it when it arrives. It's an addiction and a hunger that can't be sated, and she captures every nuance of it brilliantly.

Maria is a good film, but not a momentous one. To quote the script back itself, "I don't hear Callas". It doesn't quite allow us to understand why Maria Callas was such a mysterious icon, nor does it shed light on her inner workings. Instead, it's a beautiful portrait of a moment in time that overexplains itself. Something that Maria probably would never have done.