Divalicious Review! Angelina Jolie Soars in Boggy Biopic, Maria
By Caroline Cao | December 27, 2024 | Celebrity & Culture
Pablo Larraín’s Maria has the songs but lacks the structure. The disorganized sense of scale bogs otherwise epic scenes, as if playing them as vignettes rather than well-threaded sequences toward catharsis. But when it sings, it floats to the skies. Still, Maria is less complete as a biopic puzzle than Larraín’s and screenwriter Steven Knight’s last biopics: Princess Diana, Spencer, and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Jackie.
Residing in Paris, the famed opera singer Maria Callas is aiming for her comeback into the operatic world. But her body is expiring soon. Interviewed by a journalist, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Callas is determined to shape her story on her own terms (a motive shared by Jackie Kennedy in Larraín’s previous film). Although screenwriter Knight can produce drops of beautiful insight, his screenplays are hampered by the pacing. The laborious is especially hampering when it cuts to Maria’s past affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) without finding logical triggers. Whereas Jackie was anchored in the journalistic framing device, Maria plays indecisive about its anchor. One can argue that Maria is attempting a cadenza that ultimately wilts.
But that said, Jolie moves Maria with an air of undying gentility, as if she is claiming a lost inheritance. Maria is relentless to sing again, despite the vulture of the press. As she weeps to her sister, Valeria Golino as Yakinthi Callas, who has a different perspective on “moving on,” keeping the door open to her fraught past is the “only way I can let the music in.”
The film was viewed at the New York Film Festival.
