‘Maria’ review: biopic of the opera great fails to match her legend

There’s a moment in Maria, Pablo Larraín’s strangely pitched biopic of Greek-American opera singer Maria Callas, where her butler asks: “What did you take?” He’s referring to drugs, as the film depicts middle-aged Callas in her final days, a cross between Elvis and Norma Desmond, too ill and addicted to perform, instead rattling eerily around her sprawling Parisian apartment. “I took liberties all my life,” Angelina Jolie purrs in the title role, “and the world took liberties with me.”

• Read more: Pablo Larraín: “Cinema is always a political act”

It’s a scene that pretty much sums up the movie, which was written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Maria is both winningly camp and a little too po-faced for its own good, apparently unsure if it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek or deadly serious.

Born in 1923 in New York before relocating with her mother and sister to Athens, where they endured grinding poverty, Callas became a phenomenon. Fans queued for miles to experience her voice, which was as powerful as a tidal wave and as finely textured as the grains of sand it falls on. The so-called diva even appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, just like Elvis and The Beatles, marking her as a cross-cultural figure who proved that opera could be accessible to all.

Larraín’s film offers little sense of this astonishing rise. Most of the film unfolds in 1977 in that aforementioned apartment, an echoey quasi-museum comprised of empty halls lined with imposing, gold-framed oil paintings. Addled with the sedative Mandrax, Callas entertains a journalist and cameraman who’ve come to film a documentary about her. She drapes herself over lushly upholstered sofas beneath twinkling chandeliers, looking back on her life and mourning her career, which is portrayed in flashback. “There is no life away from the stage,” she notes passively.

The camera crew doesn’t really exist; it’s a figment of a fevered mind. The journalist is even called Mandrax. Although this is an emotive concept, it hems in the narrative, especially when we already know that her attempted comeback is doomed. Her early years are only briefly explored, with plenty of questions about her breakout success left unanswered. On the plus side, the sets are drop-dead gorgeous and Haluk Bilginer is compellingly oily as shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who doggedly pursues his romantic interest in Callas despite the trifling matter that they’re both already married.

Maria also has interesting things to say about the public’s sense of entitlement towards celebrities. When a disgruntled fan chastises Callas for missing a show years previously due to health reasons, it brings to mind Chappell Roan’s recent assertion that fame is like “an abusive ex-husband”.

Ultimately, though, Maria is a showcase for Jolie, who’s magnetic as the flamboyantly attired star. Callas is meant to be past her prime but Jolie’s singing is nothing short of extraordinary and she certainly captures her subject’s mixture of fragility, self-mythology and stoicism. Still, the third film in Larraín’s ‘Great Women’ trilogy, following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), can’t quite summon Callas’ own playfulness, which comes to life in archival footage when the credits roll.

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