REVIEW: ‘Maria’ Soars On Angelina Jolie’s Bravura Performance

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín has maintained an illustrious career spanning nearly two decades of features. While films like Ema and El Conde are certainly in the broader discussion, it’s really Larraín’s character studies on two tragic historical women, Jackie and Spencer, that have thrust him onto the international stage. With the Netflix Original Maria (2024), he adds a third. An uncomfortable visit into the headspace of “the world’s greatest soprano,” Maria Callas, during her final days, the film successfully showcases the interiority Angelina Jolie can bring to a role but gets a bit lost in the weeds trying to capture the sum total of a complicated woman.

Paris. The 1970s. American-born Greek soprano opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) is a shell of her former self. Gaunt, unsure if she’s able to sing anymore, and on a steady supply of medications, Callas spends her days mistaking reality and fantasy as her mind wanders between her present confusion and the highs and lows of her past.

There is one primary reason for seeing Maria, and that’s for Jolie. With her slender frame and searching eyes, Angelina Jolie conveys a woman lost in her own body. Even in her state, Jolie never forgets to let her charm and rich intelligence shine through. That’s the tragedy—she’s a bright light that has been dimmed by the hard path she’s walked through life. Regret, trauma, and the hard truth that she’s no longer the woman that she used to be make Callas’ final years a slow funeral march, a heavy notion that Jolie carries through at all times.

Maria tackles the complexities with mixed results

Pablo Larraín employs several methods to approximate Maria Callas’ mental state. One is the narrative conceit of Maria’s primary hallucination, Mandrax (Kodi Smitt-McPhee), a filmmaker inside Callas’ head. As she strolls through Paris alone, in her head, her loneliness is transformed into a glamorous documentary shoot, complete with a more fantastical look courtesy of director of photography Edward Lachman. The glamorous interviews between Mandrax and Maria sometimes take on the shape of a walking opera, with adoring fans crowding around her.

This only makes it more gutting when the facade drops out, and Maria is alone and confused. A more traditional approach is taken with the flashbacks to Ms. Callas’ earlier life. Those sections are simply rendered in standard black and white cinematography, although editor Sofía Subercaseaux deserves special recognition for allowing the film to flow seamlessly between reality and unreality, past and present, with Callas’ music serving as the glue.

The flashbacks are where some key issues come into play. Steven Knight’s screenplay successfully hones in on the relationship between Maria and Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). Somewhere between a father figure and a life partner, Aristotle is portrayed as someone who brought Callas some of her greatest doubts yet also her happiest moments. Their torrid love affair, particularly Callas having to contend with its end, becomes a cornerstone to understanding her psyche. Unfortunately, the other parts of the main character’s past are not effectively communicated in the same way.

A harrowing ending is its strength

Maria glosses over the implied abuse she suffered as a child. Moreover, her rise to fame is firmly in the past. Surely, this is an intentional choice; however, the audience is left with a lack of context as to who the opera star was, and it’s difficult for a newcomer to truly resonate with exactly how far she has fallen. The slack is mostly taken up by the far more compelling scenes set in the modern day. There’s a tenderness to Callas’ relationship with her butler, Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), and maid, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). It seems as if their warmth is the only thing keeping Maria alive.

The film’s strengths come to a head in its harrowing ending. Setting aside the lack of groundwork of understanding key parts of Maria Callas’ past, Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín bring the film home with quite the swan song. Staring death right in the face, she confronts it in a defiant, triumphant, though still tragic way that stays in the pit of the viewer’s stomach long after the film is over.

Maria is an ambitious film. Sometimes, that ambition’s reach is more than its grasp. From frame one to its end, however, the movie is nothing less than a gripping, empathetic portrayal of a woman’s last days that, if nothing else, reminds us of the kind of power Angelina Jolie still brings to her work.

Maria is streaming now on Netflix.