Maria review: Angelina Jolie gives career-best performance as the legendary opera singer
Maria review: Pablo Larrain's direction might be too curt and icy at times, but Angelina Jolie and cinematographer Ed Lachman are the film's biggest strengths.
Maria review
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino
Director: Pablo Larraín
Star rating: ★★★1/2
With Maria, director Pablo Larraín has marked the final installment in his unofficial trilogy of troubled women after Jackie (on Jacqueline Kennedy), and Spencer (Princess Diana). Larraín's portraits of these women are marked with an innate sense of curiosity mixed with adulation, where the women suffer and wonder and finally reclaim their space in hallucinatory bursts. No one does it like Larraín, a director whose strengths seem a little shaky here in Maria. Now available to stream on Lionsgate Play, this is a grand and visually stunning film, often prey to its own dissonance as a psychodrama of sorts. (Also read: Angelina Jolie says it was an ‘honour’ to sing for Maria Callas biopic: ‘She is very present in this film’ | Exclusive)
The premise
Unlike Jackie and Spencer, Maria is not about a woman struggling to live under the shadow of an institutional force. There is no political crisis or royal family hysteria to collect here, Maria is very much her own formation- a woman who has lived life on stage, with the light following her straight to the eye. This complicates the telling of her tragic final days, as Larraín- working here with a script from Steven Knight, chooses to place her in Paris in 1977, a week before her death. This closes in on the arc of the film, and charts her story from a sustained breath of retrospective curiosity. As the curtain lifts, the viewer is introduced to the woman in all her glory, breathtaking in her capacity to hold a theatre with the power of her voice. Such was her power, Larraín tells.
Maria is somewhat of a ghostly presence herself in her slick Parisian apartment, beginning her morning by asking her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) to tell her precisely how her voice sounds. A while later, it is her other house help Ferruccio (played by Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino), who will tell her that Bruna knows nothing to comment on her skills. But Maria, popping sedatives as she speaks, will listen to none except her own.
Larraín resorts to flashbacks and brief escapades to Maria's past, as she desperately tries to hold the same exultation of being on stage. Maria was a gorgeous figure and had an impeccable, diva-esque style, which the film captures with the help of costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. The issue arises with the rather frosty script that somehow seems to flatten the emotional wavelength of her life. The mannered dialogues go hand in hand with a self-indulgent style of direction that come in the way of things. We are so close to peek into her sadness and yet cannot come near enough.
Angelina Jolie shines
Angelina Jolie stands tall amid these issues, delivering a wonderfully textured and soulful performance as the woman coming to terms with the life she has lived, yet heartbreakingly wanting to hold on to some more. The actor is able to capture that delicate yet queenly presence that Maria had, one that commanded the room like no other.
Yet, the biggest accomplishment of Maria is the exquisite work by ace cinematographer Ed Lachman. His camera uses different film stocks to find the rhythm of her story- particularly sublime in those 35mm black-and-white sequences. The frame captures the woman in the hallways, revolves around her on stage, and poignantly watches her disintegrate like a secret of her own.
Even if Larraín's Maria lacks a degree of emotional clarity, then it is Lachman's camera which provides the much-needed articulation and vulnerability to peek into her inner mystique. Maria sings, fails and picks up again. Her sadness needs a world of her own. Her legend lives on.
