Inasmuch as genre tags mean anything at all, the question is worth pondering: Does Pablo Larraín make biopics? His most famous films– 2016’s Jackie, 2021’s Spencer, and now Maria– would all seem to fit the bill, roughly speaking. Each is a showcase for a contemporary movie star transforming herself into an enormously famous woman from decades past, and each hews largely to the facts of their lives (give or take the standard margin of artistic interpretation). But Larraín’s portraits don’t move like biopics; no one would mistake something like Back to Black for one of his (though I would love to see his take on the suitably doomed Ms. Winehouse). Rather, Larraín’s films play more like sketches on his subjects, impressionistic portraits rather than beat-for-beat essays. Larraín is more interested in what it must have felt like to live the lives of these tragic goddesses, and what they mean in the context of our occasionally ghoulish obsessions. You probably shouldn’t take Pablo Larraín’s films as history lessons– but then, you shouldn’t take most biopics as cinema.
Larraín’s latest, Maria, is built on yet another genius casting decision: Angelina Jolie, officially entering the grande dame phase of her career, as legendary opera singer Maria Callas. If you’ve heard more than a couple of notes of opera in your life, you have almost certainly heard Callas’ voice; hers was the soprano of the twentieth century, and she was as massive a star in the world of classical music as any rock singer you can think of. In typical Larraín fashion, Maria opens on the image of Callas’ lifeless body being wheeled out of her palatial Parisian apartment, then flashes back to the last few days of her life.
“La Callas,” as she is known in opera circles, is by now living something of a ghostly, Norma Desmond life, floating about her home, wolfing down Mandrax tablets, and listlessly demanding her butler and cook continuously drag her grand piano from room to room. As we meet her, Maria is preparing for a big TV interview in which she plans to lay bare her soul for the public. Her staff knows, as we do, that this interview is a figment of Maria’s addled imagination (for one thing, the TV host, played by a marvelously unctuous Kody Smit-McPhee, happens to also be named Mandrax). No matter; the diva proceeds to lead her invisible interviewer through the cafes of Paris as she recounts the operatic highs and basso profundo lows of her magnanimous career.
Maria, like Spencer, plays a little bit like a ghost story, but where Princess Diana was the gothic heroine fleeing the manor haunted by generations of ghastly royals, Maria is the ghost herself. She’s haunted by her share of spectres as well, of course, particularly that of her great love, Aristotle Onassis (a peculiar throughline in Larraín’s work, underlined by the return of Caspar Phillipson as Jackie’s JFK). But where Diana was trying in vain to outrun her ghosts, Maria seems to have largely made peace with them. We see her attempting to mount a comeback with a sympathetic conductor (who seems to be real, as far as I can tell), but part of her seems to know that she’s nearing her final curtain; in flashing back to her days with Aristotle, what she’s really doing is saying goodbye.
Unlike Spencer, which ratchets up the tension to near horror-movie levels, Maria can occasionally feel as listless as its subject. Two hours and change is a long time to hang with a woman slowly circling the drain of her own mortality, and the cumulative effect is somewhat exhausting. Few human beings have ever embodied as dramatic a presence as Maria Callas, but the version on display here is necessarily diminished, and the fact that we know from the outset the ignominious nature of her demise detracts from the tension. Jackie begins after its subject’s great tragedy, and Spencer ends before its Princess reaches hers; here, we do see it, but the effect is muted.
One thing that cannot be taken away from Maria, however, is the power of its central performance. Angelina Jolie has, of course, lived a life nearly as operatic as Callas, and perhaps even more public; as we watch, we cannot help but transpose our knowledge of the actress onto the life of the character. Jolie weaponizes every ounce of her movie star glamour, but she transforms into a version of her screen persona we haven’t seen before– every bit as wildly charismatic, but newly vulnerable, as if she has taken all those decades of tabloid scandal and externalized them rather than cover them up (if you’ll indulge the ex-record-store-clerk in me: this is the Rick Rubin Comeback Album version of Angelina Jolie). It is a transfixing performance worthy of an icon– of both of them.
This is arguably the premise of Larraín’s whole career-long project, and it here reaches perhaps its purest form. In Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart, he found ingenues on whom to project these tortured spirits of the past; here, he achieves something of a singularity, melding these two towering figures into one, reflecting their legacies off one another. He also creates perhaps his most purely beautiful film, revelling in the street cafes of Paris and Maria’s own, severely enviable apartment (this would be a good point to note that Maria is currently screening at the Coolidge and the Kendall before being shunted off to Netflix for eternity; I know I say this about everything, but you really ought to see this on the big screen). Maria may not be a biopic, but it is the story of a life, and while it may not be Larraín’s best, it remains undeniably transfixing.
Maria
2024
dir. Pablo Larraín
123 min.
Opens Wednesday, 11/27 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre & Kendall Square Cinema
Streaming on Netflix beginning Wednesday, 12/11
