Filmmaker Pablo Larraín has always had a pull towards the darker side of human nature. He's also always been fascinated with individual lived experiences and, in particular, where the two intersect. Beginning with 2016's Jackie, about Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) in the years following the assassination of her husband, followed by 2021's Spencer, about Princess Diana's (Kristen Stewart) troubled years in the British Royal Family, and now with Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as opera legend Maria Callas in the final week of her life, the filmmaker has crafted an unmistakable eye for pinpointing the source of his subject's pain and struggles and translating something that ephemeral into a visual medium like film.
Before and between these biopics (as they could ostensibly be categorized despite Larraín's absolutely singular approach to the genre), the filmmaker's body of work sustains this notion of a fascination with the underbelly of polite society, peeking into what's going on under the surface with the most troubled among us. His films outside of historical subjects, particularly The Club (2015) and Ema (2019) are captivating—if difficult to watch—portraits of very broken people in very broken worlds. Larraín seems to possess both the right kind of morbid curiosity to be willing to approach these subjects at all and the artistic vision and mastery of craft to deliver finish products that challenge what we think both about the person at the center of the film and the medium in which we're experiencing them.
For Maria, now in theaters and arriving on Netflix on December 11, Larraín again collaborates with prolific screenwriter Steven Knight (who also wrote Spencer) for a fever dream of a film that follows a deteriorating star as her mind and body begin to fail her and the small group of people around her try their best to make sense of it all. But more than that, Maria is a visually gripping, creatively realized homage of liberation and letting go for a woman who spent much of her life being what others expected of her and pushing herself to go beyond the limits of what her voice, her body and her heart could manage.
Like Jackie and Spencer, Maria is not interested in giving audiences a primer on a famous personality; this is not a paint-by-numbers review of the birth-to-death milestones of one extraordinary life. Larraín and Knight presume some familiarity with their subject, and it serves their approach well; though the film does feature a brief early montage that eludes to the scale of Callas's fame and notoriety, it instead focuses on where the famed soprano is when we meet her in September, 1977.
Namely, she is in Paris, holed up in a stunning if suffocating grand apartment with a butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and a housekeeper and cook, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) as her caretakers and only company (a sweet moment where they play a game of cards together one evening is a welcome reminder that not all in this diva's life was dramatic and traumatic). By this time in her life, Callas had triumphed in every corner of her career. She'd performed on every major stage. She'd recorded best-selling albums. She's impressed every head of state and dignitary, and she'd become a household name. She also fought irrepressible demons and medicated herself nearly out of consciousness and certainly out of the voice that made her famous. In other words, by the time we meet Callas, she is a shell of the person she once was, grappling to hold on to any semblance of control or self-sufficiency.
Told over the course of three acts with a series of flashbacks to revisit key moments in her life and employing a curious personification of the side effects of one of her medications, Mandrax (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog) as a reporter chronicling her noteworthy life), Maria is centered by Angelina Jolie's vulnerable and beautifully troubled performance. She appears to be wasting away, so thin and frail one is not surprised to hear Bruna mention at one point that Maria hasn't eaten in three days. And yet, she is newly determined to rediscover her voice and quite possibly return to the stage if she can muster the strength both physically and mentally.
A less generous take on these devices would see them as just that: contrived choices used as an excuse to give us moments of Callas singing (Jolie does her own vocal work in the film) as well as the glimpses into her past (she discusses the controversy around a lost pregnancy with Mandrax as though being interviewed, but really, we know she's telling us as a sort of narrative shortcut). I'm feeling generous, however, as I found myself falling more and more under the spell cast by Larraín, Knight and Jolie as the film went on; while it's easy to see what all those devices are up to as they emerge, they're nevertheless easy to digest as we become more and more enraptured in Callas's life and struggles.
With every new film Larraín gifts us, their scope and scale seem to increase, and such is the case in Maria as well. The film is a celebration of style, with lush period costumes by Massimo Cantini Parrini and lux production design by Guy Hendrix Dyas. A favorite detail is Callas's sumptuous closet, the setting for many interior moments for the singer contemplating her life and choices; it's an entire room filled with racks of designer choices that, if you watch closely, you'll see the pieces worn in other moments in the film. It's delicious, and entirely emblematic of the depths to which Larraín wants us to get lost in his world.
For years now, Larraín has been a filmmaker whose new work I eagerly seek out. His films are not always easy to find a way into, to be sure. In fact, I have no actual evidence of this, but I get the sense that as an artist, he is not only not interested in the easy but actively bored by it. Instead, his work, now including Maria, offers the kind of delectable challenge that offers rich dividends to reward our investment.
Maria is now in theaters and arrives on Netflix on December 11.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting Third Coast Review’s arts and culture coverage by making a donation. Choose the amount that works best for you, and know how much we appreciate your support!