Monthly Archives: December 2024

  • Maria

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pablo Larraín (2024)

    In the trailer Angelina Jolie’s Maria Callas says that being on stage was ‘an exaltation, an intoxication’, that ‘There is no life away from the stage’, that ‘My life is opera: there is no reason in opera’.  This promise of nearly non-stop comical cliches isn’t fulfilled – they rack up more slowly over the course of the whole film (123 minutes).  Maria is, like its director and writer’s previous collaboration Spencer (2021), pretentious garbage.  But this new one, despite the earlier film’s occasional longueurs, compares poorly with Spencer as camp entertainment.

    Maria Callas died in September 1977, at the age of fifty-three, at her Paris home.  More than a decade after her last stage performance, she lives, according to Pablo Larraín, in near solitude, with just a faithful cook-housekeeper Berna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), and her two dogs, for company.  The film begins with the discovery of Callas’s dead body, then moves back to ‘one week earlier’.  In the intervening days, Maria several times goes to an almost empty theatre where she tries to sing – she says she wants to sing again though not to perform in opera again – under the sympathetic tutelage of the conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield).  Maria often smokes and sometimes drinks but she eats hardly anything.  She appears to subsist on a diet of prescription drugs.  One of these is the hypnotic sedative Mandrax, also the name of the young film-maker who’s another part of Maria’s daily routine, though he’s an hallucination.  Mandrax and Maria drift through Paris, making desultory conversation about the film-within-the-film that she imagines he’s planning.

    Although I wondered if Angelina Jolie was too young for the role, that’s not the case: she’s forty-nine.  (Time flies.)  Jolie is wrong in other important respects, though.  She has cover-girl looks and is playing a woman who, though hugely photogenic, was not conventionally beautiful.  At the same time, she has nothing of Callas’s facial mobility.  This is at least partly the fault of Larraín, who has an insatiable appetite for shots of the heroine lost in contemplation.  To describe the effect as like a series of perfume-ad poses isn’t quite right (models in perfume ads don’t smoke nowadays, for one thing) but Jolie’s statuesque quality gives no insight into the person she’s playing.  ‘Should I call you Maria or la Callas?’ Mandrax asks.  Her answer is along the lines that it depends on the context.  In fact, there’s hardly a moment in the film when la Callas wouldn’t be the right choice:  Larraín presents an icon rather than a woman.  The film’s title makes little sense:  Maria Callas – unlike Jackie Kennedy, the leading lady in Larraín’s biopic-before-last – wasn’t known to the world by her first name.  If Netflix and the other distributors didn’t like the idea of ‘Callas’, why not ‘Diva’ (it’s more than forty years now since Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film of that name) or ‘Prima Donna’?

    Wikipedia tells us that ‘Jolie spent seven months training to sing opera.  For the scenes set during Callas’ heyday, an estimated 90 to 95 percent of Callas’ original recordings were used, with Jolie lip-synching along to these songs. However, Jolie’s singing comes to the fore during the film’s final act.’  That’s an admirable feat on an actor’s part but it’s not a characterisation.  To be fair to Jolie, I assume it’s her voice that we hear in the sessions with Jeffrey Tate, in which Callas’s vocals sound increasingly ropy – and are more dramatically interesting.  These bits make a refreshing change from the film’s now-that’s-what-I-call-opera soundtrack.  For the most part, though, the star’s approach seems overly respectful, not just to the memory of Callas but also to Steven Knight’s script.  Thanks especially to Peaky Blinders (which I’ve never seen), Knight has become a hugely successful screenwriter but it seems clear from Spencer and now Maria that he sees a clear distinction between writing for multiplex and arthouse audiences.  In this case at least, it’s a dumb distinction.  Knight’s Callas speaks almost entirely in pronouncements – and regardless of the addressee:  she even tells her dogs that ‘99% of your devotion is about food, 1% is about love’.  She does this for no better reason than that she’s a grande dame.

    Angelina Jolie is in thrall to Callas’s myth and Knight’s bogus artiness.  As if in compensation for all that lip-synching, she applies to those elements of her portrait where she has more independent agency, a phony high-culture gloss.  She speaks in a carefully maintained English accent that (she presumably thinks) befits an international opera singer – there’s noticeably less trace of her Greek upbringing than the real Callas’s speaking voice had.  The effect is magnified because Jolie’s version, unlike Callas in interview clips available online, never speaks casually.  Under the misapprehension that Steven Knight’s lines are gems, Jolie delivers them largo.  At the time of his sudden death in 2014, Mike Nichols was planning a TV (HBO) version of Terrence McNally’s 1995 stage work Master Class with Meryl Streep as Callas.  (As its title suggests, the play takes the form of a fictional masterclass given by Callas near the end of her life.)  Although Streep was already in her mid-sixties then, she would have been the right kind of actress for Callas.  Streep has never had the reputation of being professionally difficult but she has a fierce pride in performance and a technical daring that amount to a kind of hauteur:  she’s cut out to play divas.  The Callas of Maria is regal but sculptural; you see the much greater animation of the real thing within the first few seconds of the film’s closing credits sequence.  Jolie wears lots of sumptuous costumes – designed (or at least recreated) by Massimo Cantini Parrini.  She’s a superb clotheshorse:  but that’s hardly high praise given what else she needed to be.  Not that it’s obvious what Pablo Larraín had in mind.  Unless Maria‘s whole purpose is to demonstrate the impenetrable mystery of an icon – a purpose probably antithetical to satisfying drama – his film has to be accounted a failure.

    As the Wikipedia quote above makes clear, the ‘one week earlier’ extended flashback is not the film’s only flashback.  Callas’s doctor (Vincent Macaigne) tells his patient there’s not just one thing wrong – she’s got heart problems, a dodgy liver, etc.  Maria, similarly, is a serious case of bad-biopic syndrome – when a flashback won’t do, chuck in a montage.  Some of the supporting cast are woodenly emotionless, including Stephen Ashfield’s Tate and Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Mandrax.  Perhaps Smit-McPhee’s rationale is that he’s playing a figment of Callas’s zonked imagination but he still makes for dreary viewing.  Except when he’s inadvertently funny.  Maria tells Mandrax of the time she visited the ailing Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), her great love, in hospital.  At the end of this flashback, Mandrax asks, ‘How was he?’ – although Maria has already explained that Ari was dying.  ‘We are Greek – death is our familiar companion,’ she now tells Mandrax, who tries to get in on the epigrammatic act. ‘She was his wife but you were his life’, Kodi Smit-McPhee replies, with hardly a glimmer of feeling in his voice.

    ‘She’, of course, was Jacqueline Kennedy.  By this point of Maria, you’re desperate for crumbs of entertainment, however kitsch:  when it emerged that Callas cut short her hospital visit because Jackie had just arrived in the building, I wondered if there might be a cameo from Natalie Portman, passing Angelina Jolie in the corridor.  No such luck:  Ari insisted that Maria leave by the back entrance.  But though the star of Jackie (2016) is nowhere to be seen, the man who played JFK in that Larraín film, does turn up again.  Callas is in the audience at the Madison Square Garden gala in 1962 at which Marilyn Monroe sang, ‘Happy birthday, Mr President’; the next morning, Kennedy joins Callas in a hotel breakfast bar.  The Danish actor Caspar Phillipson, with his supposed uncanny facial resemblance to the late President, has played him several times since Jackie but has developed not a sliver of the legendary charisma:  Phillipson’s JFK has the looks and charm of a very minor civil servant.

    Maria eventually gets back to where it started from.  Berna, Ferruccio and the dogs return home to discover their mistress’s lifeless body.  The animals are very well behaved at this point; they’re as dumbstruck as the housekeeper and the butler.  Once Ferruccio has made a phone call to Callas’s doctor to tell him she has died, this changes.  The dogs now start to whine – even keen – at their mistress’s passing.  This may be the most inventively operatic touch in the whole film though you do wonder, bearing in mind Maria’s earlier aperçu, if the pooches are just worried where their next meal is coming from.

    28 December 2024

  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michel Gondry (2004)

    Charlie Kaufman’s three films as a writer-director – Synecdoche, New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – have paid gradually diminishing returns.  Each boasts a distinctive form and structure but Kaufman’s preoccupations have become predictable.  Melancholy, misanthropy and the horror of mortality dominate.  Any major new themes struggle to get a look in.  Around the turn of the millennium, though, he wrote a succession of inventive screenplays that, in the hands of different directors, yielded films of greater tonal variety than his own films do:  Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002); George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002); and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  At the same time, Kaufman’s idiosyncratic signature meant that he was emerging as one of a rare breed in cinema, the writer as auteur.   

    Gondry’s movie, often described as sci-fi romantic drama but pretty well sui generis, has a clever central idea and is increasingly maddening.  The clever idea is a memory erasure procedure:  those emerging from a failed romance can pay a New York City outfit called Lacuna to have memories of their ex wiped from their brain.  The film turns maddening as the technical possibilities of the memory-wipe start to eclipse the main relationship in the film.  How much is this down to Kaufman, how much to Gondry?   To try and answer the question, it’s worth bearing in mind their CVs pre-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  This was the first film (and is still the only film) on which Kaufman shared a writing credit with others.  His is the only name on the screenplay but the ‘story’ is credited to Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, too (all three were awarded the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay).  Gondry had directed only one other feature film – Human Nature (2001), also scripted by Kaufman, which sank without trace.  Gondry was far better known (is perhaps still best known?) as a director of music videos.  In the late 1980s and beyond, these were often for the French group Oui Oui which he co-founded and whose drummer he was.  In the course of the next decade he moved into the video big time, working with, among others, Björk and even The Rolling Stones.

    What’s coming next probably betrays shameful ignorance of the art of music videos.  But it’s striking that, once the erasure process moves to centre stage, tricksy visual effects hold sway in Eternal Sunshine for quite a time.  Until this happens, Gondry has been telling us how Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) met and fell for each other.  The film’s style, from the start, is often hyperkinetic and the narrative occasionally disorienting but Gondry directs his two leads with a sure and sensitive touch.  Casting Carrey and Winslet in these roles proves highly effective.  It’s Clementine who’s the zany free spirit while Joe is the doleful (Kaufman-esque) introvert.  So Jim Carrey’s character is tentative, introspective and not at all liable to the mugging, gurning antics that made Carrey’s name and which get on plenty of viewers’ nerves (mine included).  Joel is a closed-in, pedantic fellow who struggles to function socially, let alone romantically.  Carrey’s manic qualities aren’t quite invisible but they’re fruitfully diverted – for example, in Joel’s terrific sprint from one NYC railway platform to another, as impulse compels him to take Valentine’s Day off work and catch a train to Montauk.  (He finds himself in the same carriage as Clementine.)  Kate Winslet, of course, gives emotional depth to exuberantly kooky, blue-haired Clementine (her hair’s blue in the early scenes anyway:  it changes colour later on.)  Winslet is vividly eccentric but she’s delivering much more than a turn.

    Things go wrong between Joel and Clementine.  They split up but, when he happens to find out that she underwent a procedure to lose all memory of him, Joel is so distressed that he decides to reciprocate.  According to Lacuna protocol, he records a tape on which he recalls his affair with Clementine.  Lacuna’s head honcho is Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who leaves Joel’s memory-wipe in what the doctor wrongly assumes to be the safe hands of his assistants, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood).  Once the procedure on Joel’s brain is underway, Stan does drugs and has sex with Mierzwiak’s secretary, Mary (Kirsten Dunst).  Patrick sneaks out to see Clementine.  We’ve seen this young man before:  he turned up outside her apartment the morning after Clementine and Joel had spent their first, happy night together.  It emerges that the beginning of the film was far from the beginning of that relationship; and that Patrick, taking a fancy to Clementine, has used her tape recording – in which she describes the pros and cons of life with Joel – as a guide to seducing her.

    You’d guess it’s Kaufman’s rather than Gondry’s idea that the patient getting their mind cleaned, though apparently unconscious, retains the ability to react emotionally to the memories passing through, then out of, their brain.  The erasure process starts with the most recent memories; since these are painful to Joel, he’s happy to lose them.  Once it rewinds to his earlier memories of Clementine, he feels differently.  He tries to conceal Clementine in memories that didn’t actually involve her, the erasure goes haywire and Stan, who’s been otherwise engaged with Mary, can’t get it back on track.  The film also loses focus – and the strengths it had at the start.  Joel’s attempts to hide Clementine in other memories, including of his early childhood, mean that Jim Carrey, so disciplined until now, is back to his old super-wacky tricks as, wearing a kiddie outfit and miniaturised, he becomes Joel as a young boy.  As you’d expect, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst give good performances but the subplot involving their characters takes over to too great an extent.

    It’s Mary who explains the film’s title.  She tells Howard Mierzwiak, when he arrives hotfoot at Joel’s apartment to try and rescue the memory-wipe, that she’s fond of reading ‘inspirational’ famous quotes, such as:

    ‘How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!

    The world forgetting, by the world forgot:

    Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

    Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.’

    Mary attributes this to ‘Pope Alexander’ then tells herself off for sounding ‘like a dope’ by getting those names the wrong way round.  In other words, Charlie Kaufman muffles his own pride in being well read (a pride less muffled by the time he made I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)) by putting words into the mouth of a beautiful, temporarily dumb blonde.  Mary also takes this opportunity to admit to Howard that she’s in love with him.  They kiss, just in time for Howard’s wife (Deirdre O’Connell) to turn up and witness the kissing.  She furiously tells her husband to admit the truth – that Howard and Mary had an affair a while back and Mary’s memories of it were erased.

    Joel’s last memory to be wiped is of his first meeting with Clementine on a Montauk beach.  As this memory disintegrates – literally:  the beach house breaks into fragments – Clementine urges Joel to meet her again in Montauk.  (It seems that, like Joel, she didn’t want to jettison her memories entirely.)  It’s Valentine’s Day when he comes to after his treatment; as he starts his commute to work, he’s seized by the imperative to head for Montauk instead.  What we initially assumed to be their first meeting was actually a reunion.  Gondry now replays highlights of the couple’s visit to the frozen Charles River in Boston.  In the meantime, Mary, appalled by how Lacuna operates, steals patients’ records and tapes and mails them out.  Joel and Clementine are hardly less appalled by their unhappy memories of each other.  But they decide to try to rebuild their relationship.

    It’s a relief that Eternal Sunshine regains momentum in the closing stages.  Joel and Clementine’s reconciliation may seem a minor victory and their future together may be uncertain but the film’s ending feels emotionally truthful.  The finale is some recognition too of risks inherent in the Lacuna programme:  a memory-wipe-ee could find out from a third party what has happened to them; an individual’s or a couple’s romantic destiny may dictate that history repeats itself; you could start again and go wrong again.  In retrospect, Jon Brion’s score, as used in the early stages, is very right:  the music seems to be going its own way, as if to suggest that what’s on the screen is far from the whole story.  Despite Michel Gondry’s visual pyrotechnics, Ellen Kuras’s cinematography often has an appealingly raw look.  Twenty years on from its original release, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is as exasperating as ever.  But it’s better than any new English-language film of 2024 that I’ve so far seen[1].

    19 December 2024

    [1] Afternote:  This opinion certainly didn’t change watching Pablo Larraín’s Maria on my last cinema visit of the year.

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