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Although cited as the final film in Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s melancholic trilogy of fantastical biopics of three of the twentieth century’s most iconic women—following Jackie and Spencer—Maria has just as much in common with Neruda, his phantasmagorical biopic of poet-politician Pablo Neruda. Much like that film’s surreal flights of film-noir fancy, Larraín recreates the last week in the life of opera diva Maria Callas through memories, imagined interviews and operatic musical numbers that only exist in the mind of the dame herself.
The film, which debuted at Venice, also exists as a return to form for star Angelina Jolie, who plays the diva with the same perverse playfulness and repressed loneliness that she brought to her last great starring turn in her own misunderstood masterpiece, By the Sea. In that film, Jolie explored her feelings of grief after the death of her mother. Here, she embodies the torment of grieving a part of yourself. Maria has lost her ability to sing, and therefore can no longer conjure La Callas.
J2b3m writes of Jolie’s performance, “To take such a larger than life character and play her so big yet make her constantly feel so small, so vulnerable and so beautifully, painfully human is quite something.” Jack agrees, asserting that “Angelina Jolie’s career-best performance shifts between La Divina at her most forceful, dazzling on the world’s stage, and Maria, alone in her apartment, her failing body no longer able to contain the lifetime of accumulated hurt now spilling out of her like a phantasmagoria.” MEG
