AP: Angelina Jolie glides through the final days of Maria Callas’ short life in Pablo Larraín’s Maria , a dramatic, evocative elegy to the famed soprano. The film is at turns melancholy, biting, and grandly theatrical – a fitting aria for a once-in-a-generation star. In Maria , reality takes a backseat to raw emotion, serving the film more as a dream than a history lesson about La Callas.
Early on, she pops some Mandrax and tells her devoted butler, Ferruccio (a simply wonderful Pierfrancesco Favino), that a television crew is on the way. “Are they real?” he wonders. “As of this morning, what is real and what is not real is my business,” she says calmly and definitively, making a feast out of Steven Knight’s sharp script.
It’s one of many great lines and moments for Jolie, whose intensity and resolve belie her fragile appearance. And it’s a signal to the audience as well: Don’t fret about dull facts or that Jolie doesn’t really resemble Callas all that much. This is a biopic as opera – an emotional journey fitting of the great diva, full of flair, beauty, betrayal, revelations and sorrow.
In Maria , we are the companion to a protagonist with an ever-loosening grip on reality, walking with her through Paris, and her life, for one week in September 1977. The images from cinematographer Ed Lachman, playfully shifting in form and style, take us on a scattershot journey through her triumphs on stage, her scandalous romance with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk .
