Was Maria Callas really a whining, self-pitying, endlessly needy victim? Angelina Jolie stars as revered opera singer in a new biopic that projects little of her cultural stature, writes BRIAN VINER

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Published on Friday, 30 August 2024 06:53

Written by Daily mail

           The late shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis would have approved of director Pablo Larrain’s trilogy of films about three of the most iconic women of the 21st century: he slept with two of them.Larrain’s swansong, following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), is Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as the revered opera singer Maria Callas. It had its world premiere last night at the Venice Film Festival.An expert excavator of misery, Larrain likes to scrutinise his subjects at the most vulnerable times of their lives. Jackie focuses on Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following the assassination of her husband, President John F Kennedy, while Spencer unfolds over the Christmas of 1991, with Princess Diana at her unhappiest and most bulimic as she contemplates leaving the Royal Family.This film presents Callas in the last few days of her 53 years, seeing her dead lover Onassis in her torrid dreams and tormented attempts to rediscover her famous voice.It was a famously influential voice, too. Linda Ronstadt once called her the greatest ‘chick singer’ ever: listening to Maria Callas records taught her everything she needed to know, she said, about singing rock’n’roll.So Callas transcended the world of opera, yet Maria gives us disappointingly little sense of that. Yes, we know she’s a superstar, but Larrain, and screenwriter Steven (Peaky Blinders) Knight, never quite convey the magnitude of her cultural stature. In the 1970s, even as a North-of-England schoolboy who knew an awful lot more about George Best’s cars than Georges Bizet’s Carmen, I was fully aware of Callas and her predilection for pulling out of performances in distant cities such as Milan and New York. It wasn’t opera news. It was news.She had a personality to match her gigantic talent and was reputedly so formidable that - another choice quote - the pugnacious John Huston once said he’d rather go six rounds with the heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey than cross swords with her. How unfortunate it is, then, that she spends most of Maria’s two hours as a whining, self-pitying, endlessly needy victim, imperiously bossing around her household staff to be sure, and talking in neat epigrams (‘I took liberties all my life and the world took liberties with me’), but not otherwise demonstrating much of that dazzling charisma.In truth, she (itals) was (close itals) also a victim. Her mother bullied and blackmailed her, her husband stole from her, and Onassis beat and drugged her. But not much of that emerges either, except in a flashback to her Athens childhood, when her mother appears to be pimping her out to Nazi soldiers.All that said, Jolie gives one of the performances of her career. This might be a flawed depiction of Callas but not by her; wearing enough mascara to sink one of Onassis’s ships she is completely believable in the role and even does some of her own warbling alongside some top-class lip-synching to the real Callas, having reportedly trained for seven months until she was ready to perform in public for the first time. Admittedly I’m no expert but I couldn’t tell the difference. So hats off. There is already talk of an Oscar nod.The film begins with Callas’s death. In Paris, in her grand but stuffy mausoleum of an apartment, she simply conks out one day, killed by her addiction to pills and fame. She is discovered by her devoted housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino), who has health problems of his own, a dodgy back caused by shunting a grand piano around until his mistress is satisfied that it’s in the right place, which it never is.From there we are whisked back a week, with Callas desperately searching for her high notes, and sometimes further, for instance to a monochrome 1959 when she first meets Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and even to the celebrated birthday party for JFK, the one where he was serenaded by Marilyn Monroe, about whose singing voice Callas is predictably catty. A subsequent scene in a restaurant, where the mighty diva repels the US President’s flirtations, is presumably a piece of whimsy on Knight’s part.More whimsical still is the casting of Kodi Smit-McPhee as a human manifestation of Mandrax, the pill to which Callas was most in thrall. He takes the form of a TV interviewer, I suppose to conflate the two things that caused Callas’s demise: drug addiction and celebrity.Jolie’s ‘tour de force’ keeps all this watchable, and there is one fabulous line – when Callas berates the dying Onassis for marrying Jackie Kennedy. ‘Sometimes you get married because you have a free day,’ he replies. But Maria too often slumps when it should sizzle. I found it dreary, and longed for the end at least 20 minutes before it arrived. We all know that it’s not over until the fat lady (or in Jolie’s case the not-so-fat lady) sings, but she keeps us waiting rather too long.Maria is a Netflix film, with a release date yet to be announced.

source : Daily mail