2024 | rated R | starring Angelina Jolie, Kodi Smit-McPhee | directed by Pablo Larrain | 2h 3m | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie), the most famous opera singer in the world at the time, lives out her final days in Paris struggling with her identity and her legacy as an illness takes her singing voice.
While this kind of intimate costume drama won’t be every genre fan’s cup of tea, I was intrigued by it purely based on the involvement of director Pablo Larrain and writer Steve Knight. Larrain’s previous film, the intimate costume drama about princess Diana over a single Christmas weekend, Spencer, was my absolute favorite movie of 2021. Maria offers another chance to slip behind closed doors and into the world of the wealthy and powerful, but the film isn’t nearly as potent as Spencer. It carves down Larrain’s thesis about a public figure’s identity to such a sharp point that it now becomes obvious and superficial.
It’s possible Larrain wants to make a career telling stories of famous Trapped Women, but if not, he’s completed at least a trilogy of them – first with Jackie, then Spencer and now Maria. Stories of dignified famous women trapped by either very real public threat (Jackie), royal tradition (Spencer) or their own legacy (Maria). All of them working under the microscope of the press of their respective eras, having every move be judged and second guessed and theorized on.
The best way to explain why a movie doesn’t work is to put it up against one that does, and vice versa. It’s here where you can see how superior Spencer is. That movie traps the viewer. It feels claustrophobic. It more elegantly lays in the irony of its heroine’s gilded cage, a ‘cage’ most people would love to be ‘trapped in’ that no longer impresses them. In that movie Diana was surrounded by people, theoretically, and always standing on the outside of them, showing us her loneliness in the aftermath of festivities. In Maria, Maria is lonely. She has two servants to commiserate with and occasionally goes to a local bar and argues with the bartender but otherwise sits in her mansion among opulent things, pining for her prime of life. She has, in a lot of ways, done this to herself. We are asked if that is equally as tragic as it being done to her.
The movie is stately and beautiful, in the sense that it lives in a beautiful setting (Paris, 1970) but it isn’t particularly visually inventive. It lacks those surreal touches where Spencer went into the mind of its subject. Instead, going back through Callas’ memories and presenting them straight forward. Where Spencer did the hard work of creating characters and bigger themes inside its single-location trap, things to decode and turn over for days afterward, all through visual clues, Maria remains shallow. What you see is what you get. It is Larrain’s subtext, without restraints, and boiling up to the surface as text.