In The Mood For Adulation. “Maria” – Review
- Colton Gomez
- Jan 6
- 3 min read
Review
By Colton Gomez | 01/05/25 | 11:46 A.M. Mountain Time
Musical, Drama| Rated R | 2 hr 3 min | "Maria" Release Date: August 29, 2024
“Maria” is a character study of the opera star who came from nothing. It’s a beautiful film. It’s not a very emotionally dynamic film and the lack of significant variation started to wear on me towards the end. However, Director Pablo Larraín should feel very accomplished. The script by Steven Knight seems very difficult to get right. It seems even more daunting to capture these emotions visually. Both of them had to get it right and they did. This allowed Angelina Jolie to go as far and high as she does.
Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) reflects on her life of opera greatness as she craves the adulation that comes with performing. It is food and water to her (more so than actual food and water); and she is famished and parched. She is highly medicated and thinks she can’t trust everything she sees. She needs but rarely listens to her house staff Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). They support her one-hundred percent but can agonize being with her. We follow Maria in the last week of her life and watch her try to regain all that she had.
Jolie gives it her all as Maria. She delivers a very compelling performance of a faded star who wants so desperately to shine again. Her strength is building the character of Maria quietly in the background through looks, gestures, posture, and speech. This allows her to explode in performance later as she belts out arias which cause the veins in her neck to bulge. Her performance is very emotionally powerful.
I was sure in some moments that Jolie wasn’t singing because it sounded so professionally operatic. Her performances mix technical singing with character building and I thought the film hired a singing double for Jolie, but I couldn’t be sure. After the film, I read from Variety that Jolie’s vocals are mixed intricately with Callas’s in the film’s performance numbers. The article mentions the scene in which it is mostly Jolie singing. The fact that I couldn’t really tell them apart speaks to Jolie’s dedication and artistry.
It's a smart script by Knight with smart direction by Larraín. They put you into the headspace of Maria by seeing what she sees. We are hallucinating with her. At one point, she asks her sister, “Are you real?” She imagines full-fledged orchestras in the rain that are there just for her and choirs that come out of nowhere to sing to her. She talks to a camera crew she claims has come to interview her, who follow her all around the story. Some scenes will make you think they are hallucinations and others you might think are real.
Maria works closely with a pianist for what seems like twenty minutes a day. In these sessions, she rehearses her arias. She sings momentous songs from her life and brings us into the past to view them. It’s in these intimate scenes where we can really see Maria for who she is. She is defined by her music. Music is what gets her attention, praise, and flirtations. We can see what it means to her to lose all of that. These are filmed on an empty stage where she once performed to great acclaim. It’s the perfect image to complement her state of mind.
“Maria” is a beautiful film about the opera star. It speaks to people who dedicate themselves to one craft and about all the positives and negatives that come with that. Maria needs her music. She also knows that the music comes from places of pain and suffering. Larraín’s film is a wonderful portrait of Maria Callas as an artist in her last days. Somehow, he captures the subconscious of a bloated ego attached to an ultimately fragile human being.
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Review by Colton Gomez
Colton Gomez earned his BA in Film Studies from Weber State University. He owns and operates ColtonGomez.com. Here, he covers new releases in theaters and on streaming. For short versions of his reviews, check out his LetterBoxd
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