Maria

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September 16, 1977. Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) dies of a heart attack at 53 in her Paris apartment. Flashback a few weeks earlier, Maria intentionally annoys her loyal butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) by asking him to move the piano to a different room every day while she sings to her housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) who always tells her that she is magnificent after each impromptu performance. The truth of the matter is that the opera legend has lost her singing voice, which sets her plans in motion to recover it not so she could go back to performing for an audience but rather so she could perform for herself. Her consumption of prescription drug Mandrax results in hallucinations conjuring a young filmmaker also named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who is supposedly filming a documentary about her life. As she struggles with the memories of her glory days, she comes to terms with her life as La Divina accompanied by bittersweet experiences such as her relationship with a Greek magnate who dumped her for Jackie Kennedy.

To those complaining about how depressing this film is, this is just the modus operandi of Pablo Larraín who has made a name in the industry by choosing a certain historical figure and zeroing in on a particularly turbulent period of his/her life by reimagining it through film. The downside is that we know this is artistic license through and through. Nobody really knows, except those individuals themselves, how they really felt during those personal times. The good thing about this is it allows Larraín to craft a poignant psychological portrait, leading to a good track record of Academy Award nominated performances for his muses.

Yes, they get the nomination, but they never win. The closest to get to the Oscar statuette was Natalie Portman for Jackie by winning Critics Choice that year, while Kristen Stewart also scored a nomination for Spencer. Angelina Jolie remains in most pundits’ top five predictions for next year’s Oscar Best Actress race. The odds are rather stacked against her for a win, though, but this heartfelt performance is a good way of welcoming her back to the Lead Actress conversations after a long hiatus from acting. If nominated, she'd be Larraín’s third consecutive muse to benefit from his strength and track record as an actor’s director.

Unlike Jackie and Diana whose larger than life public personas living rent free in people’s heads Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart were able to lean on heavily for their portrayal, Maria Callas is rather niche as far as popularity is concerned. Unless you are a fan of opera or you lived during her heydays, you wouldn’t really know who she is. Once curiosity is piqued and you start searching for videos online, you’ll quickly find out that it really is her legendary voice that sets her apart. Other than that, her only distinctive physical feature seems to be her big nose, which makes one wonder why Jolie didn’t go for prosthetics.

What? Nicole Kidman won an Oscar wearing a prosthetic nose in The Hours, and a prosthetic nose also helped Bradley Cooper totally vanish into Leonard Bernstein in Maestro last year. Part of what makes Larraín’s faux biopics work is relying heavily on imagery to convince his audience to suspend disbelief. Despite Portman or Stewart not looking anything like the women they were portraying, when you saw them onscreen you believed that was Jackie and that was Princess Di. In Maria, it’s quite a hard sell because when Jolie appears, you don’t see Maria Callas. You see Angelina Jolie playing Maria Callas. It’s distracting like that.

Does that mean Jolie didn’t deliver? She actually did. If we dismiss the lack of attempt to make her look more like the woman she is portraying and instead focus on the showcase of grief a human being teetering toward the end of her life trying to reconcile her past with her rapidly concluding present is supposed to feel, then I’d even dare say that this has been Jolie’s most emotionally honest performance to date, if not the best in her entire filmography. If this were the case, though, then perhaps they should’ve just opted for an original screenplay that didn’t have to ride on the pull of a historical figure’s life.