'Maria' review: Angelina Jolie sings but Maria Callas biopic doesn't soar

Angelina Jolie deserves some flowers for her steady performance as Maria Callas in the biopic “Maria,” even if the movie doesn’t completely do the opera legend justice.

“Maria” (★★½ out of four; rated R; streaming now on Netflix) is the last in director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy about haunted iconic women. While the previous (and far better) films – “Jackie” and “Spencer” – leaned toward horror in their tragic stories, the closer finds Callas in her final days, reexamining her life for a TV interview and wrestling with the ghosts of past roles, as well as the remnants of a once-spectacular voice. The melodrama is packed with more style – so, so much style – than narrative substance, though Jolie (who earned a Golden Globe nomination this week for her portrayal) fully commits to the role both emotionally and musically.

“Maria” focuses on the final week of the American Greek soprano’s life in 1977, living in a grand Parisian apartment many years after publicly retiring. At 53, she’s still quite the diva, singing while her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) makes an omelet and ordering her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) to keep moving around a gigantic piano, even though he has a bad back.

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Maria is also a hot mess. Sickly and in failing health – her diet mainly consists of prescription pills – Maria speaks of nightly visits from her wealthy late lover, the “ugly and dead” Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). At times she’s the awesome “La Callas,” and other times she’s simply Maria. At times she hides from the world, others she wants to eat at a restaurant where she’ll be recognized because “I’m in the mood for adulation.”

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Yet even after burning her old opera costumes, she yearns to strengthen her voice enough to sing once again, even if just for herself. “I don’t want to go just yet,” Callas tells her pianist in a sentence dripping with layered meaning.

Much of “Maria” plays out in fantastical fashion – there are flashbacks to various eras, in assorted visual styles – and even her “real” life moves as if a fever dream. It’s no coincidence that the vanilla TV journalist who comes to interview her, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), has the same name as Callas’ primary meds.

Her time in opera and the public eye is shown through different periods, like having to entertain Nazis in her youth and coolly telling off John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) when he inquires about Onassis spending time with his wife. But the movie shows its real heart in those scenes where Bruna and Ferruccio are there to help Maria, despite her best efforts to fall apart. 

The operatic numbers are showy and gorgeous, with great costumes and production design. They also spotlight one of the movie’s biggest weaknesses: Jolie learned to sing opera for the role, and through Hollywood magic, Larraín created tracks blending the voices of both the actress and the real Callas – with varying degrees of each, depending on the time frame. Quite a few of those scenes come off as lip-syncy and artificial, though that mix works better in the moments when the movie Maria’s voice is at its rawest and roughest.

Would casting a real opera singer have been an easier, perhaps wiser proposition? Sure, but Jolie's passion for Callas is obvious on screen.

Many of the most powerful scenes come when she’s reacting to hearing herself sing, such as one eatery outing where she demands the owner stop playing one of her tunes. “I cannot listen to my own records,” she says with a fury. “Because it is perfect and a song should never be perfect.”

“Maria” has plenty of artistic ambition though flubs quite a few notes, a biopic that never soars like a Callas aria even with Jolie’s considerable talent giving it a lift.

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