It might seem strange to say about an actress who emerged like a supernova, won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted (1999), was nominated for Changeling (2008), and brought Lara Croft to life, that Angelina Jolie’s on-screen career has never quite hit the expected heights. With this musical biopic, though, she’s finally landed a role that will have audiences talking about her acting again.
Directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, Maria casts her as American-Greek opera legend Maria Callas, a woman trying to rekindle former glories whose personal life, including a failed relationship with world famous socialite Aristotle Onassis, is cannon fodder for the world's tabloids. It wouldn't be wildly off-beam to call it a role Jolie has spent her life preparing for.
The script, by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, looks back over Callas’s life in the week before her death in September 1977. It opens on the day she died in her house in Paris, which, with its marble busts, antique furniture and wall-to-wall paintings, looks like a room at the V&A. Shifting back a week, Jolie depicts Callas as a reclusive figure who is addicted to prescription drugs and whose loss of that formidable vocal range forced her into an unhappy retirement four years previously. Her chef (La Chimera’s Alba Rohrwacher) and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) try their best to indulge her, but everyone realises she’s losing her grip.
It’s a role Angelina Jolie has spent her life preparing for
She hears voices. One of them belongs to an imaginary journalist played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who intermittently interviews Callas throughout the film. It’s a framing device reminiscent of 2016’s Jackie, Larraín’s biopic about the woman who would replace Callas in Onassis’s bed.
It’s the type of creative liberty the director used in Spencer, his edgy portrait of Lady Di at the edge of sanity. But in a movie already full of lush montages that flit back and forth through Callas’s life, the concoction feels clunky and unnecessary. Much better are montage sequences that showcase Larraín at his most spectacular: mixing monochrome and colour images to give the veneer of an old celluloid film and show Callas at her heady peak – both on and off stage. They may occasionally represent faux history but they’re never less than great drama. One terrific scene has the soprano and JFK (Jackie’s Caspar Phillipson back for a second turn) bonding over their experiences as spurned lovers.
And with Knight’s script full of juicy dialogue – ‘Book me a table at a cafe where the waiters know who I am. I’m in need of adulation’ – this enjoyable biopic offers a loving and affectionate portrait of Callas that never airbrushes her foibles. It’s likely to put Jolie front and centre in the Oscar race, too. Girl, Resurrected.
Maria premiered at the Venice International Film Festival.