‘Maria’ review: Jolie’s Callas is a cold, one-note bore

Maria Callas rose to fame as the voice of Tosca, Medea and Carmen, opera’s eternally doomed heroines. If opera still appeals to audiences a century from now, perhaps it will sing Callas, a fighter who survived the Nazi occupation of Greece, the ruckus at La Scala, the media hazing on several continents and a humiliating public affair only to be obstructed by it. own coping tools: sedatives and starvation.

“Maria”, starring Angelina Jolie, is the director Pablo LarrainThe latest effort to build its own canon of 20th century tragedians. His previous melodramas “Jackie” And “Spencer” were fables about two painfully self-aware celebrities at their nadir: Larraín peeked behind the facades of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana less to humanize them than to expose their wounds. Callas, however, was infamous for his tantrums, so Larraín, perversely and disappointingly, chose to respect his imperious appearance. If she’s the big diva he works with, Larraín lets her win.

Here is Callas at the end of his life. Her corpse is the first thing we see on screen, although cinematographer Edward Lachman has such a dazzling trick of inserting chandeliers into the frame that it takes him a minute to spot her body. In the flashbacks that follow, Callas attempts to grandiosely dismiss liver disease as if it were spoiled wine. She spends most of the film doing drugs on Quaaludes, which in the 1970s in Paris were sold under the Mandrax brand. Screenwriter Steven Knight even has her strolling with an imaginary character named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a television journalist, whose existence she hallucinated to feel important. Mandrax starts his softball questions. She crushes them.

If you’ve seen any old interviews with Callas, you know that real journalists tended to be rude to her. First, they would ask Callas if she was a monster. Then they blamed her for spending nine years with Aristotle Onassis, only to be dumped by the future Jackie O. They had to prick the goddess to see if she bled.

Very early on, Callas countered these inquisitions with humor. Accused of having thrown a bottle of cognac at a director, she replied: “I wish I had done that. It would be a shame for the bottle. As Callas got older, she became stiffer, and that’s the version we’re looking at here. Majestic, reserved and stubborn, Jolie plays Callas as a lonely fifty-year-old who rejects love, fame, joy and music and doesn’t want to fight. that difficult to recover them. His character arc is just a blueprint; from scene to scene, you never know if she will act. Callas wants to be adored but she doesn’t want to be known. Her exhausted governesses, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), speak volumes with every silent, fearful look, and when they get too personal with her, Callas orders them to move the piano as punishment.

Larraín half-heartedly attempts to make Callas a feminist martyr, alleging, in the most indirect way possible, that she was forced to trade her body with soldiers for money and food. Biographical points are shamelessly ignored, including her marriage to a man who doesn’t even deserve a name before being dumped for Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). Adding to the disorientation, young Callas (Aggelina Papadopoulou) looks nothing like Jolie – not her lips, her eyes, her nose, her jaw, her figure, nothing. Yet the casting choice highlights how Callas reshaped herself in the 1950s, losing a third of her body mass to transform herself from a zaftig soprano cliché into a high fashion sylph (and, this doing so, sacrificing a bit of its punch).

Callas could wrap herself in a cape and force the audience to focus on her. His stillness was magnetic. All the emotions were rushing into his eyes and into his throat. Jolie trained in opera for seven months to prepare for the role and, according to Larraín, sang on set herself. What we hear is his voice mixed with the actual voice at concentrations ranging from 1% to 70% – the latter, I suppose, in the scenes where the retired Callas tests his own vocal strength. To my ears, Jolie sounds fantastic, the kind of voice that would knock them out at karaoke night. But Callas Peak hits the senses like a thunderbolt. Larraín attempts to capture this power in his first close-up of Jolie, bare-shouldered, singing into the camera in bold black and white. But the rigor of the shot works against it, leaving us too much time to notice that Jolie’s throat barely seems to move, to wonder if her eyes shouldn’t have more passion.

Blazing passion was once Jolie’s only thing. I could close my eyes right now and see the wicked smile that made her a star in 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted.” But after enduring tabloid scrutiny, she, too, became too tightly controlled. Here, there is only one second in a montage where, during a performance of Medea, Jolie gives a smoldering look. The moment is so electric you wish the whole movie had that juice. We don’t see Callas as vibrant again until the end credits, and then it’s stock footage of the real thing flashing a mischievous smile.

“A song should never be perfect,” insists Callas. I agree. Some critics called her singing lousy. Not in the factual sense, because that would be crazy, but closer to how fashionistas know how to add a jarring accessory. The shock makes things interesting. Jolie, however, uses perfection as armor, so no matter how much her Callas insists that the opera is intoxicating, it doesn’t matter how intoxicated her character actually is. Easthis performance is a restrained interpretation of madness.

Larraín allows himself occasional visual thrills, as a crowd of Parisians suddenly uniting in chorus says. Otherwise, we are so immersed in Callas’s illusions that things seem flat. “What is real and what is not is my business,” she declares, having bended the world to her will.

Oddly, after swooning to giant tune after giant tune, I left the theater focusing on one of Larraín’s smaller sound design choices. This happens when Callas, resplendent even in a bathrobe, slips into the kitchen to sing to Bruna while the poor darling prepares him an omelette. The solo goes on and on, long enough to make the point that, yes, Callas had fans clamoring outside the Metropolitan Opera, but she could also be a little annoying. And then, mid-song, Larraín adds a little noise – the sound of the spatula hitting the pan – to let us know that even in the fiercely protected bubble of the prima donna, her ego doesn’t always trump a plate of eggs.

I wish Larraín had cut Callas down to a larger size. He is too protective of his fellow artists to unleash the fury that fueled his art. Callas could sing three octaves, but the film mostly comes down to one note.