Maria
Updated: Feb 23, 2025
Maria is a shallow and vain entry in Pablo Larraín's sad woman series that has a lot of aesthetic and performative emotion but Steven Knight's script fails to get to the core of Maria as a subject and make her sympathetic.
Set during the last week of her life, opera diva: Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) has lost her voice, overmedicating, hallucinating, and on her way to heart failure. Her time consists of daily appointments with a pianist in a attempt to reclaim her magical voice, going to cafes where she can feel "adored" by fans, constantly asking her loyally aching butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) to move a grand piano from room to room, and having a never ending interview with an imaginary filmmaker called Mandrax (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) where she recalls her past regals about her tentative relationship to Aristotle Onassis.
Angelina Jolie gives a confident performance but doesn't elevate the character from more than just endless pouting and smug self-absorption. It is mostly a result from the poor writing that prevents Maria from being as intelligent and sharp as Larraín's other films. Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher have the most moving and investing roles as Maria's lasting and loving servants who as much as they try can't save her from herself.
Larraín introduces some Fellini esc fantasy into elegantly shots and designed sets and pandering but it all adds up to nothing. Unlike Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), the effort put into the look and period detail does very little to capturing the internal mindset of Maria. Jackie was about duty in a time of overbearing grief, Spencer was about suffocating in queenship, but Maria is just about a sad woman moving from room to room. I think that this form of arty anti-biopic that has emerged in the last decade which Larraín helped pioneer is on a decline, as more and more films attempt to replicate this aesthetically creative approach are becoming more and more empty as they get lost in looking impressive while loosing sight of an interesting character study. The biggest disappointment has to be that Larraín teases a crossover with Jackie Kennedy and while Caspar Phillipson's cameo as JFK is a small treat, I would have been so excited to see Portman show up for a minute.
I'm not familiar with Maria Callas's life or career, and I have no doubt that the impact she had as a opera icon is special and pivotal, but this film failed to convince me why.
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