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
