There’s such a fine line between poignancy and melodrama, and an even finer line between pompous bloviating and insightful genius. Pablo Larrain has made two brilliant films about 20th-Century women that hit the right side of those lines.
But the trilogy falls off the rails at the last stop with Maria (2024), which trips over itself completely, wanting to hit the previous highs of Larrain’s pseudo-biopics and plunging head-first into a steaming vat of soppy melodrama instead with its treatment of Maria Callas’s final days. Even if it’s not actively awful, it’s a huge disappointment which taints this previously-flawless series of films, sometimes with malicious intent. Angelina Jolie couldn’t save Maria (2024), even if she’d tried.
The first real warning sign – and the decision that essentially dooms Maria (2024) – is the choice to make this a film set entirely within the last week of Maria Callas’s life. It results in a deeply unsettling portrait of the most beloved opera star of the 20th Century, defined by her neurotic tendencies and insufferable treatment of others, and the film tries in vain to convince the audience that there’s anything other than miserable tragedy to the person she’s become. Angelina Jolie portrays a Maria Callas who’s really nothing other than unbearable, but the film wants you to believe that her dramatic musings on life and love are somehow complex, or even correct. It doesn’t convince, and it tips the film into total melodrama.
And it’s a shame for Angelina Jolie, who could have made this a late-career showstopper performance. She’s perfectly fine as Callas, but it’s not primarily her fault. The writing in Maria (2024) is dire. Callas pontificates that blackbird song is the only song for which they are known, and that she’d like to discover what the ‘human song’ is. She declares in response to being told that she’s unreasonable that her life is opera – and opera is unreasonable. It’s the dialogue equivalent of root canal surgery. The film refuses to believe that its nonsense is anything other than the highest wisdom, however, and as a result more people were laughing in the cinema than going along with any of it.
The structure of Maria (2024) also leaves a lot to be desired. We ostensibly go along with Maria Callas through the eyes of a documentary filmmaker called Mandrax, who shares a name with the drug Callas is addicted to. The film makes a really lame attempt to pretend that Mandrax is real, rather than a figment of Callas’s hallucinating mind, and gives up pretending around the halfway mark, and so this review won’t bother keeping that very poorly kept twist either. Kodi Smit-McPhee tries for intrigue as the imagined reporter, but his dialogue, similarly, veers between perfunctory exposition poorly designed to help keep the audience up to speed and irritating pontificating.
However, one of the most infuriating parts of Maria (2024) is actually its downright malicious attempt to step on the feet on Pablo Larrain’s better biopics. Specifically, Jackie (2016) was a wonderful portrait of John F. Kennedy’s wife. Natalie Portman brought calculated poise and excruciating sorrow, while Larrain brought flawless direction to this first attempt at a biopic.
But Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas occupied similar spaces, both running in the same 1960s circles, and both were partners of the tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Therefore, the flashbacks within Maria (2024) run the risk of breaking into the same world so perfectly constructed by Jackie (2016). Rather than smartly avoid that possibility, Maria (2024) decides to merge the two worlds in flashback, with some unbearably ham-fisted references to Jackie Kennedy that break the fourth wall completely to pander to the audience, like she’s a Marvel superhero they’ve been waiting to see.
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The absolute worst of these scenes features President Kennedy himself appear for a superfluous scene, which only serves to gleefully wave the fact that he’s the same actor from Jackie (2016) in everyone’s face. It feels horribly like an attempt to create a Pablo Larrain Cinematic Universe, and instead breaks the immersion of everyone who’s seen both films, and retroactively taints Jackie (2016) by dint of association with a strongly inferior film. The middle of this trilogy, the much-beloved Spencer (2021), at least remains intact.
It’s not all bad writing and clumsy plotting. Larrain’s eye for colour and lighting remains impeccable, and Stephen Ashfield turns in a good shift as the conductor helping Maria to sing again, toning down the cheese-grater effect (both cheesy and grating) of the dialogue with a bit of quiet levity. Angelina Jolie does give it an honest go, and the best moments of the film exist in flashback to her childhood in Nazi-occupied Greece, which manage to be both tasteful and moving.
But this was still a very difficult film to make it through. Something went deeply wrong somewhere in production. Pablo Larrain is a hugely talented filmmaker and Steven Knight has written some brilliant screenplays. Maria (2024), though, is a failure on a lot of levels and completely deflates an otherwise fantastic trilogy of biopics. If you’ve been a fan so far, feel free to skip this one.
Still: Netflix