Films for Breakfast

Pablo Larraín is a filmmaker I deeply admire due to his many different sensibilities and how he handles the characters in his films. For my money, Jackie is far and away his best film – a haunting portrait of fleeting legacy anchored by an incredible performance from Natalie Portman. With Maria, Larraín attempts a similar approach at telling the story of one of the greatest opera singers in the world, Maria Callas. The film finds Maria (Angelina Jolie) in 1970s Paris where she hasn’t sang on stage in years and is approaching the final days of her life. In these final days, Maria reflects on all her entire life and identity and confronts everything that shaped her into the talent she is today.

Angelina Jolie hasn’t appeared in a film in nearly three years, so there has naturally been quite a bit of hype around Maria not only due to her brief absence from cinema, but for this being a true return to a dramatic and serious performance. It’s hard to say whether or not Maria is worth the hype, because if you’re judging it solely on Jolie’s performance, she is turning in quite impressive work. Jolie finds a nice middle ground between keeping Maria’s emotions reserved while also being incredibly vulnerable and human with her longing for understanding and love. Anytime an actor signs up for a biopic about a musician I worry that the film will be standard Oscar bait, but for better or worse, Maria largely tries to avoid that narrative.

The film uses a narrative device where you find out a lot about Maria throughout how she performs and interacts with others, from her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferrucio (Pierfrancesco Favino) to a TV journalist named Mandrax (Kodi Smith-McPhee) – she only truly opens up when around others. It’s through this framing device that I feel like the film misses a step or two in comparison to Pablo’s previous films. While Jackie was an intimate look into the life of Jackie herself and used the assassination of her husband of a launching point into that story, Maria feels oddly cold and distant from Maria for a majority of its running time. The worst moments are those spent with Mandrax, as the film tries to take on a dreamlike quality anytime she’s being interviewed about her life. This comes across as more of a barrier to insight and genuine emotion rather than actually conveying anything of substance about Callas.

The film has undeniably impressive craft and technical elements, as the cinematography and production design are quite great and the costume design/make-up are both aces as well. Maria finds itself in a weird middle ground where I’d compliment so many elements that make-up a lot of the most important elements of a film, including its central performance – yet I hesitate to say that I found it to be satisfactory. The cold emotion of Spencer, a film where Larraín explores the life of Princess Diana (played by Kristen Stewart), worked due to it feeling in-tone with the isolation Diana felt to the family she was marrying into and the public perception she had to keep-up, despite how she was feeling internally. Maria attempts a similar style of coldness, yet feels less intentional and more frustrating as an audience member.

By the end, despite many impressive elements at hand such as a rock-solid performance from Angelina Jolie and some gorgeous production design and cinematography, I found the film to be largely unengaging and hollow. The film never quite finds a sense of pace, and feels like it largely tries to avoid being a standard biopic at the expense of having the audience get to know Maria Callas in any kind of meaningful way. It’s far from one of the years’ worst due to so many technical accomplishments, but it feels like a largely missed opportunity and only half of what it could’ve been.

2.5/5