There’s a story that soprano Maria Callas, secluded in her Paris apartment in the months before dying of a heart attack at 53, could be found paging sadly through her clippings. “Why didn’t they like me?” she asked.
Povera piccola! To borrow from Sally Field’s Oscars speech, they did like her, they really liked her. “La Divina” was worshipped — revered — as both a celebrity and a performer, and in the nearly 50 years since her death she’s remained probably the most famous of any opera singer.
She had both an electric stage presence and an unforgettable voice that, while not technically beautiful, projected a fierce, scalding intensity. You could sear a steak with that voice.
Now Angelina Jolie, reminding us that she’s not only a major star but a serious actress, plays the soon-to-expire Callas in this film from Pablo Larraín, a director known for his prickly yet poetic biopics of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Jackie, with Natalie Portman) and Princess Diana (Spencer, with Kristen Stewart).
Jolie, delicately thin with large, haunted eyes, gives a striking performance — luminous and diaphanous. She’s also damply mournful, like a handkerchief left behind by a loved one after a funeral.
This is a portrait of the artist as a living ghost, waiting to fade away and become the genuine, deceased thing. (For years there have been rumors, highly disputed and never proved, that she may have died of suicide.)
Callas, bored and heart-broken in retirement, chokes down tranquilizers, laments her broken affair with Aristotle Onassis (who left her for Jackie) and occasionally meets with a piano accompanist, only to flee in despair at the sound of her irreparably frayed voice. She also shares memories during a sporadic interview with a journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But he’s a phantom, a figment of her imagination, maybe death itself.
The film, in fact, is so haunted by death that you may feel you’ve been shut up in a mausoleum with Jolie’s pacing, glamorous spirit. The question, though, is whether she’s a convincing Callas or just the brilliant exemplar of any doomed, weeping diva. Answer: exemplar, although a good enough one that she’ll probably be nominated for another Oscar.
However, the film makes the grave mistake, at the very end, of showing the real Callas, with her flashing, devouring glance. Suddenly you can see how wide Jolie is of the mark. She’s brilliant, yes, but inauthentic. (If you’re a Callas devotee, stream the enthralling if somewhat eccentric documentary film Maria by Callas.)
This lack of authenticity may not matter to audiences who know more about Jolie’s battle with Brad Pitt over a vineyard than Callas’ feud with rival Renata Tebaldi. (Callas described her own voice as champagne and Tebaldi’s as Coke.) But Maria also lacks depth as a study of an artist — it has the moth-like sadness of any story about a beautiful, bereft woman fluttering aimlessly around her rooms. But not much more.
Unlike Jackie Kennedy or Princess Diana, women with shrewd political instincts and a determination to find and keep their place in the world, Callas had only her voice to offer the world. Without that, she was nothing.
And so, like a cat sensing that its lives have been used up, she retreated from view and died alone.
Maria is now on Netflix.
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